Welcome to the Royal Holloway Data Visualisation Competition Showcase! This is the culmination of three workshops on open-source programming. In this workshop series, participants learnt to clean, analyse, and visualise their data in R.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at three fantastic visualizations created by our talented workshop participants as part of a competition we held following the workshop.     

Participants were asked to use the same set of World Cup data freely available from Tidy Tuesday, and tasked with creating a visualisation that told a story about the competition over the years. Participants had two weeks to submit their entries. 

We asked for all plots to be constructed using R, and for all code to be open and available. Each visualization below showcases different data visualization techniques using R, with all source code available for replication.       

A big congratulations to all the participants for their hard work and creativity; all participants had little to no experience of open-source coding prior to the workshop!

Stay tuned for future competitions and more exciting visualizations.

Staff Category: Ryan Jefferies

This first visualization, created by Ryan Jefferies, explores whether world cup goals have been shrinking over time. It features a great use of clear colours to show individual country and overall trends. Ryan uses the number of games each team has played each year to condition his y-axis variable. This means that the relationship between x and y variables are irrespective of whether some countries would have played more games each year (if they were successful).

Post-Doc Category: Desislava Arabadzhiyska

This stunning visualization by Desi delves into sociopolitical, geographic and economic factors that might impact on goals scored at the World Cup. All plots tell their own story, and Desi scraped freely available country-level statistics to complement the World Cup data. The innovative use of faceting allows her overall message to come through while breaking down the core narrative into interesting chunks.

PhD Category: Cheng-Yu Hsieh

Last but not least, designed by Cheng-Yu Hsieh, focuses on whether different stages of the tournament led to more goals being scored per match. This eye-catching graphic uses colour and boxplots to highlight the trend increases in goals as the tournament progresses. Cheng-Yu made great use of violin plots to show the distribution of goals scored at each stage, averaged over all years that the World Cup has been recorded in the data.