Ryan Robitaille

A fun little Viz I did about Bigfoot sightings.

Basically, I harvested all the sighting info off of The Bigfoot Field Research Organization site with Python and the Scrapemark module – inserted it into a local SQL Server database – cleaned it up and threw up a pretty looking Viz using Tableau Public.

Visualizing Squatch of the Nation!

I’m pretty happy with it – its quite interactive and hopefully someone finds it fun or interesting.

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.

As I’ve been very vocal about all over Twitter and elsewhere – I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Tableau Public over the past few weeks. Lots of learning, experimentation, tweaking, and some full blown data / analysis presentations have occurred. During that time I learned a lot about the way the product works and continue to try and “jazz” up my Tableau “vizes” in any way I can. Here are a couple of trick that you might find as useful as I did.