The last few Tuesday nights I’ve been working on a visualization about the history of the NFL. This week, however, I don’t feel like fidgeting with javascript, so I’m going to do something different and work with my hands. Innovations Sessions are at their heart about solving problems. Tonight’s problem is that I don’t own a cribbage board. I could certainly buy one, but the pop-out, machine-painted boards don’t seem up to the caliber of my tastes. A cribbage board reflects a lot about a person and so to adequately represent myself, I need to make mine by hand. If you’re not familiar with cribbage, take a second to read up on it. Design Before I start anything I look for inspiration. I found a lot on etsy and was also impressed by this wood burned piece. Being a surfer I also checked for any surfboard flavored pieces and found these two.
I’m going to pick up where I left off two weeks ago working on my chart of NFL team win percentages over time. Last week I focused on getting the infrastructure setup, which was much easier than I thought, and walking through a basic tutorial to get a line graph working in D3. This week I’m going to do some customization. Wins, Losses & Ties To get the chart working last week I simply calculated the win percentage for the Falcons for a few seasons and plugged this in. Realistically that isn’t scalable, I’ll want to be able to input data in the form of a W-L-T season record and have it render. To calculate a win % I will count each win as 1 point, loss as 0 points and tie as .5 points. I’ll then divide the sum by the total number of games to get a %.
Tonight I’m going to start working on an idea I had for an interactive chart of NFL win percentages. The idea came to me when thinking about the Detroit Lions and how bad they are. I wondered if they had always been this bad or if it was only recently. (Hint: Always) So I thought it would be cool if I could look and see every team’s win percentage for each NFL season going back in time. This would be something easy to do in Excel or a static charting library, but I’m going to use it as an excuse to play with/learn an interactive data visualization library called D3.js. This is the javascript library that drives many of the webs coolest visualizations, like this New York times feature on NBA shot percentages. I’ll have to get it working first, but once I do I’ll be able to add interaction