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Introducing a Weekly R / Python / JS / etc Vis Challenge!

>UPDATE: Deadline is now 2016-04-05 23:59 EDT; next vis challenge is 2016-04-06!

Per a suggestion, I’m going to try to find a neat data set (prbly one from @jsvine) to feature each week and toss up some sample code (99% of the time prbly in R) and offer up a vis challenge. Just reply in the comments with a link to a gist/repo/rpub/blog/etc (or post directly, though inserting code requires some markup that you can ping me abt) post containing the code & vis with a brief explanation. I’ll gather up everything into a new github organization I made for this context. You can also submit a PR right to [this week’s repo](https://github.com/52vis/2016-13).

Winners get a free digital copy of [Data-Driven Security](http://amzn.to/ddsec), and if you win more than once I’ll come up with other stuff to give away (either an Amazon gift card, a book or something Captain America related).

Submissions should include a story/angle/question you were trying to answer, any notes or “gotchas” that the code/comments doesn’t explain and a [beautiful] vis. You can use whatever language or tool (even Excel or _ugh_ Tableau), but you’ll have to describe what you did step-by-step for the GUI tools or record a video, since the main point about this contest is to help folks learn about asking questions, munging data and making visualizations. Excel & Tableau lock that knowledge in and Tableau even locks that data in.

### Droning on and on

Today’s data source comes from this week’s Data Is Plural newsletter and is all about drones. @jsvine linked to the [main FAA site](http://www.faa.gov/uas/law_enforcement/uas_sighting_reports/) for drone sightings and there’s enough ways to slice the data that it should make for some interesting story angles.

I will remove one of those angles with a simple bar chart of unmanned aircraft (UAS) sightings by week, using an FAA site color for the bars. I wanted to see if there were any overt visual patterns in the time of year or if the registration requirement at the end of 2015 caused any changes (I didn’t crunch the numbers to see if there were any actual patterns that could be found statistically, but that’s something y’all can do). I’m not curious as to what caused the “spike” in August/September 2015 and the report text may have that data.

I’ve put this week’s example code & data into the [52 vis repo](https://github.com/52vis/2016-13) for this week.

library(ggplot2)
library(ggalt)
library(ggthemes)
library(readxl)
library(dplyr)
library(hrbrmisc)
library(grid)
 
# get copies of the data locally
 
URL1 <- "http://www.faa.gov/uas/media/UAS_Sightings_report_21Aug-31Jan.xlsx"
URL2 <- "http://www.faa.gov/uas/media/UASEventsNov2014-Aug2015.xls"
 
fil1 <- basename(URL1)
fil2 <- basename(URL2)
 
if (!file.exists(fil1)) download.file(URL1, fil1)
if (!file.exists(fil2)) download.file(URL2, fil2)
 
# read it in
 
xl1 <- read_excel(fil1)
xl2 <- read_excel(fil2)
 
# munge it a bit so we can play with it by various calendrical options
 
drones <- setNames(bind_rows(xl2[,1:3],
                             xl1[,c(1,3,4)]), 
                   c("ts", "city", "state"))
drones <- mutate(drones, 
                 year=format(ts, "%Y"), 
                 year_mon=format(ts, "%Y%m"), 
                 ymd=as.Date(ts), 
                 yw=format(ts, "%Y%V"))
 
# let's see them by week
by_week <- mutate(count(drones, yw), wk=as.Date(sprintf("%s1", yw), "%Y%U%u")-7)
 
# this looks like bad data but I didn't investigate it too much
by_week <- arrange(filter(by_week, wk>=as.Date("2014-11-10")), wk)
 
# plot
 
gg <- ggplot(by_week, aes(wk, n))
gg <- gg + geom_bar(stat="identity", fill="#937206")
gg <- gg + annotate("text", by_week$wk[1], 49, label="# reports", 
                    hjust=0, vjust=1, family="Cabin-Italic", size=3)
gg <- gg + scale_x_date(expand=c(0,0))
gg <- gg + scale_y_continuous(expand=c(0,0))
gg <- gg + labs(y=NULL,
                title="Weekly U.S. UAS (drone) sightings",
                subtitle="As reported to the Federal Aviation Administration",
                caption="Data from: http://www.faa.gov/uas/law_enforcement/uas_sighting_reports/")
gg <- gg + theme_hrbrmstr(grid="Y", axis="X")
gg <- gg + theme(axis.title.x=element_text(margin=margin(t=-6)))
gg

RStudioScreenSnapz024

### Fin

I’ll still keep up a weekly vis from the Data Is Plural weekly collection even if this whole contest thing doesn’t take root with folks. You can never have too many examples for budding data folks to review.

18 Comments

  1. Thanks for doing it. Cant appreciate it enough. Possible for you to alternate between R and d3 or may I selfishly add both at the same time

  2. Hi – thanks, I took this as an opportunity to brush up on my mapping skills. :-)

    http://jabranham.com/blog/2016/03/ggplot-maps.html

  3. Hi, many thanks for the cool initiative!

    I had problems downloading and reading the excel files, also I couldnt open them with Excel itself. I made it work with the following addition:

    if (!file.exists(fil1)) download.file(URL1, fil1, mode = “wb”)
    if (!file.exists(fil2)) download.file(URL2, fil2, mode = “wb”)

    Apparently they are binary files. Did you have this issue as well?

    • I think this is a “Windows download.file()” issue. OS X uses curl for download.file() by default and I think Windows doesn’t. Thx for poking at that tho & I think I need to ensure I try to write the download.file() cross-platform call more cross-platform in the future (I actually thought R would take care of it and I may just use the curl pkg from now on).

  4. This is a great idea !

    I tried to do something with gganimate with mixed results.

    https://jerome-laurent-pro.github.io/2016-04-01-datavizweek13/

  5. Thanks for posting the challenge! Not sure if GIFs count as visualizations yet (?) but I included one anyway for kicks:

    https://notesbytim.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/drone-sightings-in-the-us/

  6. Hi,

    Can you please explain the following lines:

    gg <- gg + themehrbrmstr(grid=”Y”, axis=”X”)
    gg <- gg + theme(axis.title.x=element    text(margin=margin(t=-6)))

    Additionally, please confirm – I suppose the deadline ends on 5th for this week.

    Thanks /

  7. And my contribution to the mapping efforts: http://rpubs.com/BalazsDukai/vis_2016-13

  8. This was fun; thank you for organizing it! http://rpubs.com/juliasilge/168308

  9. I explored time-of-day data: https://github.com/xangregg/dronetimes

    • This is crazy good! I wanted to do look at this but once I discovered that the date/time column was useless I decided that parsing the details out of the text was too much like hard work :-)

      Suggests to me that the seasonal peak could be down to the extra hours of daylight.

  10. My submission: https://github.com/ottlngr/52Vis/blob/master/01/01_52Vis.md

  11. Here’s my entry – won’t win any prizes but is fairly pretty and gave me the opportunity to try out the leaflet package.

    Image – https://www.dropbox.com/s/4f9wfzwenupi7jm/Flight%20Data%20Vis.png?dl=0

    Code – https://gist.github.com/barnettjacob/58601c78f22616a02c3d3e1fa1aea724#file-flight_data-png

  12. Posted on twitter pic.twitter.com/uI3Ff2lhQU

  13. Hello, Many thanks for the challenge.

    I tried to extract feature from text data (report narrative ) and visualize it using ggplot2 and gganimate.
    Link : https://github.com/mukul13/2016-13/tree/master/mukul


3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. By Introducing a Weekly R / Python / JS / etc Vis Challenge! – Mubashir Qasim on 31 Mar 2016 at 6:19 am

    […] article was first published on R – rud.is, and kindly contributed to […]

  3. By Visualizing data quality with FAA drone data - JMP Blog on 11 Apr 2016 at 10:09 am

    […] to explore a recent FAA drone data set, inspired by a weekly data visualization challenge called 52Vis. The data set contains "reports of unmanned aircraft (UAS) sightings from pilots, citizens and law […]

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