In this weekly Tableau blog series that I’ve decided to call the Summer of Data, I’ll be using Tableau to explore different and interesting data sets. All the visualizations are published to Tableau’s robust public platform, Tableau Public.
News Events in Finland
This week, I’ve decided to use the Google BigQuery service and access the fantastic “Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone” project, or GDELT for short. It’s a collaboration initiate to construct a catalog of humanity’s societal-scale behavior and beliefs across the globe — Basically, it’s a database of all the news events of the world since 1979. The dataset is updated every day and is currently about 400.000.000 rows.
I’ve extracted all relevant events related to Finland (that have been reported in Finland), between 1979 – 2016. The date control can be used to navigate through the ages by month and by selecting a specific datapoint on any of the visualizations, you can filter with it.
How to read the chart
Important topics of these reported events are displayed in the tag cloud and are coloured according to their tone (red being a bad event and green being good). The Event Quad Class visualization below the tag cloud displays each reported event by Quad, a classification for event types. These are either verbal or physical events (e.g. diplomatic talks or wars). Also, these events are coloured according to the Goldstein Scale, which is a numberic range between -10 to +10. This captures the theoretical potential impact that type of event will have on the stability of a country. Lastly, the map shows where the event was reported.
Tune in next time for some more data visualizations! In the meanwhile if you want to experience Tableau for yourself, try out our free Tableau Desktop trial.
