My project for course: Creative Data Visualization for Narrative Designs

My project for course: Creative Data Visualization for Narrative Designs

For my project, I wanted to create a visualisation to do with chess players, as it is a topic of interest to me. Originally, I had wanted to focus on women in chess over time, but ultimately decided to choose a more general subject to start with for something a bit easier.

I used the rating files provided on the FIDE website as my data source. Because I was dealing with extremely large datasets, I used R rather than Google Sheets to explore and manipulate the data. I was able to create some plots using the ggplot2 package, which served a similar purpose to RAWGraphs. I imported the plots as svg files into Inkscape, which is a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

The process of creating the visualisation consisted of much trial and error. Some of the many iterations of it are shown below. I decided on the final version as it somewhat resembles chess pieces and I think best shows the differences between countries.

I'm not sure whether the visualisation can be easily understood by readers unfamiliar with distribution/violin plots, or whether having two y-axes may be confusing. I was also not sure whether the yellow circles showing the proportion of female players add much valuable information to the image, as they are so small and the differences are subtle.

Otherwise, I am very happy with how this turned out and excited to make more visualisations and improve. Any feedback will be welcomed. I am endlessly inspired by Federica's work and thorougly enjoyed the course.