Day 2: Electronic Data

In which I learn that Tableau is not the only way to visualize data

Jul 03, 2023

Today’s Stats

Hours Slept | 9 hr 30 min

Kilometers Walked | 15

Total Kilometers Walked | 15

Highlights

On my first trip to Europe after I graduated from college in 1984, I brought a blow dryer, a Walkman, and a European plug converter. This trip I ditched the blow dryer.

While working on my recently completed consulting gig, I taught myself Tableau in order to do some data visualization. For the non-geeks out there, Tableau is this thing that turns boring data into cool pictures. Say, for example, an interactive bar chart of how many minutes of video were published by the NFL hourly on game days during the 2022 season. I had so much fun working in Tableau, I have been threatening to create a data viz dashboard of this trip. (Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact and say Tableau to me at a party!)

On today’s walk, I stopped for free coffee and met Tommy, who loves statistics and shared some data with me. Not an electronic device or Tableau dashboard to be found. But a lot of data to be visualized.

Tommy broadcasts the country of origin of the 3 most recent pilgrims. Here, you can see that I was recently preceded by Dutch and German folks.

He has 7 years (2014-2022) of proprietary St. Olavsleden pilgrim profiles. As with all good Big Data entities, he protects his data and I respect that.

Tommy doesn’t just track country of origin. He tracks:

Gender: more women than men do the pilgrimage because “women are tougher”
Means of Transportation: bike or walk
Accommodations: rooms or tents or outside without a tent. (2 women/ 0 men so far, because … see item 1, natch)
Data Encryption Algorithm by Me (55 hundar = 55 hounds!)