Dataset of the Day: Here Come the Olympics!
August 1st, 2008by Kevin Burke
About the Author: Kevin Burke is a member of the FortiusOne analysis team. Read more from this authorThe 2008 Summer Olympics are coming to Beijing, China on 8.8.08 and USA athletes are poised to place very well in the international competition. For the past four years athletes have been practicing for the games and now the time has come to represent the USA.
A dataset was created on Finder! that maps the hometowns of all the USA Summer Olympic athletes competing this summer.
“USA 2008 Summer Olympic Athlete Hometowns”
The map above shows points that represent individual athletes and their hometowns in the lower 48 states. From looking at the map you can see that there are a few “Olympic Athlete Hotspots.” Some include: Los Angeles area, San Francisco area, and Philadelphia area.
You can also use this map to see if any of the athletes are from your own hometown. If any are, you can then cheer for your hometown athletes as they compete in Beijing.
There are also a few other datasets on Finder! that deal with the Olympic games. They include:
“All-Time Medal Count by Country, Global, 1900-2006”
“US Olympic Gold Medals Per State, USA”
“US Olympic Gold Medal Winners – Track and Field – by Hometown, USA”
All these datasets show us a unique way to look at sports data through the use of maps.
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August 1st, 2008 at 3:16 pm
This map nicely illustrates my favorite aspect of sociological mapping: hey, things happen to people were people live! Or in this case: athletes live where people live!
All kinds of great inferences can be drawn from socioeconomic maps: people get cancer where people live, people have babies where people live, drug addition and crime happen where people live!
No problem! Normalize your values by population! But then… because the geography of Podunk County is so much larger than the geography of New York, you can’t see the results of the places that are interesting… because that’s where the people live!
August 4th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Hi Paul,
Appreciate the feedback and your excellent use of punctuation. Definitely makes the post come alive.
Great point on the importance of normalization, and some of the issues it causes. One way to get around the big polygon issue is to use graduated or proportional symbols when you are making the map.
One of the goals we had with Finder is making the source data available so if folks would like to show a different view with the data they are free to do so. If you would like to see rates instead of raw numbers easy to download the data and normalize the data.
The data team created another Olympic dataset that compares the number of athlete hometowns per state normalized by the 2007 state population to provide one example of how the data can be refactored http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/3678.
That kind of work can be a bit sophisticated for users less savvy than yourself and we’ve been working on baking this into the application. Will let you know when it is up and going publicly.
best,
sean