Iron Viz: Geospatial Contest - National Parks in the UK

There's nothing overly special about my Iron Viz entry.

Iron Viz actually is one of the biggest stones I tripped over to find myself within the realms of Tableau, Alteryx and eventually, the Data School UK. Entries from Neil Charles, Steve Fenn & utlimately the gorgeous visualisation from Chris Love (which lead to me following him on Twitter) for the Wikipedia data contest were the happy twists has taken me to where I am today.

This is the first Iron Viz contest I've entered - I've thought about entering the past 6 (six!!) feeders, but ultimately haven't either created or submitted anything. This time I thought I'd have a proper go.

Spatial: The Final Frontier

Tableau 10.2 brought .shp files as a native connection, and thousands of cartographers rejoiced. For me, it meant smaller problems could be solved in my day to day job, but I've never gotten deep into spatial data.

The value Tableau brings to the market & to us as data practitioners is the 'easiness to use'. For me, this means showing and sharing how something doesn't have to take a ton of time or effort to build or reproduce. So last Wednesday (15th), I set about hunting for some .shp files. I dug a few places, and found myself on the UK's Office of National Statistics Open Geography Portal (https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/) - This is a treasure trove of shapefiles, but for me things like OA, LSOAs, Electoral regions.. it was stuff that was easily done + not an interesting topic.

Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

For those of you who don't know, there are certain areas in the UK which are designated the title of "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" - I've always found this funny, but it gave me a brain wave - What about the National Parks in the UK? So I jumped in, found the shape files - and just as you'd expect, bringing this data into Tableau was dead easy. Like, stupidly easy.



The Simplest Form of the Viz

As I mentioned above, I'm a huge believer in making this easy & not having to resort to workarounds. This is when I decided not to screw around with this Iron Viz entry (which, I found, was a fools errand) and that this was the only shapefile I wanted to use. That's it. I was done. No QGIS, no blending of shapefiles in Alteryx - Let's just use public data and connect it to Tableau and boom. I'm away.

The issue, of course, for me came down to the data. There were a lot of statistics, facts etc - But I hadn't properly hunted for the right dataset. Now, with this Iron Viz, the options were of course to look for the data first, then the shapefiles second - or do it the other way around. I spoke with my colleague Valantis about this earlier - I don't think there's a right answer here at all.

I played with Mapbox a little, before choosing a pre-made map for my background, and then added some numbers to supplement the data.

On Wednesday evening, I thought I was basically done. Here's what I had.

Boom, I thought. I'm done. I sent it to a few people - and got some feedback. But I swore to not do anything, and just make small changes. One of them told me - "If you wait until you are 100% happy with it, you will hardly sleep for 2 weeks." - It's truly an addiction.

Let me share with you the iterations I went through since this one...

  

Before finally...

https://public.tableau.com/profile/scribblr.42#!/vizhome/NationalParksintheUK-IronVizGeospatialContest/NationalParksintheUK

Phew!
What a ride.

The Viz
So what's the purpose behind this visualisation? It's effectively an infographic which details the parks in the UK which are given the name "National Park" - This means that the Government has classed the area as one of conservation, where the residence, development & treatment of the area is protected and maintained through funding and support by the local governments. It also explains how vital the parks are, through tourism and also supporting seasonal jobs within the local areas.

I wasn't able to find data which fitted this theme, so ended up going for a semi-interactive visualisation with information through both text and through key metrics. One thing I did consider doing is adding a "rank" for context, however, I wasn't certain whether this would clutter the viz so ended up leaving it out. Another thing I thought about adding was a picture in the bottom left which was dynamic, showing a gorgeous image of the selected park. Perhaps next time!

Conclusions
Iron Viz is an addictive challenge. Similar to the Tableau Public Hackathon, it challenges you to think of a topic under a time constraint and hunt for relevant data in order to create something. Anything!

I would LOVE to hear feedback on my visualisation, and ideas on the theme. It was the design + formatting which took the longest, and I finally settled on the charcoal + white combo after I got my Dad to have a look at the viz to see which colour he thought worked. Neither, he said, make the background white.

Thanks for reading!