Sunday, June 13, 2010

Post winning Tableau contest

Some of the things I experienced from winning Tableau visualization contest:
- It was pretty fun to see the search result on my name got over 10000 hits, the day after the press release
- The Fit & Fat viz appeared in Times Square New York
- Celebration from my colleague at DePaul (wine & cheese)
- Acknowledgement from the Dean and faculties of School of CDM
- Announcements in DePaul Facebook, DePaul Magazine, EM&M Newsletter
- Free trip from Tableau to Web 2.0 (San Francisco) with my husband 
- Radio interview with Charlie Hagger (KOMO Radio Seattle)
- Spoke at the kick-off meeting at the San Francisco User Group meeting (May '10)
- Spoke at the kick-off meeting at the Chicago User Group meeting (June '10)
- Interviewed by Dan Murray (blog coming soon)
- Speaking engagement with the Federal Home Loan Bank (mid July)
- Speaking engagement with the Atlanta Tableau User Group (Aug)


I'm also making new contacts, especially with those who are interested in data visualization: with folks in Tableau, Tableau experts, consultants, bloggers, from inside and outside the States. I think that is the most valuable award of all.



So why my viz won the contest? An internal source told me it was the extra analysis (the + and - factors, the two charts at the bottom) and the design (which comprise of a lot of things).
The dataset contain 90+ variables. It was a challenge to come up with a number of variables that are highly correlated with obesity rate. I'm glad the extra step paid off.  

As St. Vincent De Paul once said 'It's not enough to do good, it must be done well'.