

Game of Thrones as a Data Visualization
Data VisualizationModelingposted by Harpreet Ghuman September 27, 2017 Harpreet Ghuman

I came to know about Tableau a year back when I saw Adam McCann’s amazing viz. on GOT. Ever since then, I have been intrigued by the possibilities of Data Visualization. So creating this GOT viz. in Tableau one year from then is like coming a full circle.
GOT has no dearth of major characters but the show is brutal in ending their lives sooner than usually expected. The viz is essentially depicting timelines (going vertically upwards from S01E01 to S07E06) for 79 of the major characters in the hit series, from their debuts to their deaths – and there are many of those! Season 3E08 had maximum number of major characters alive (right before the infamous Red Wedding episode) and the number has been on a downward trend ever since as the show heads towards its culmination. The viz. divides the characters among their houses (clubbing the characters of lesser houses into the “Others” on the right half in purple). You can select a line to see character details at the bottom of the chart. You can hover over the skulls depicting death to see how the character died. The second page explains the chart in a bit more detail, pointing out some major incidents in the course of the show like the Red Wedding, the Wildfire Incident at the Sept of the Baelor, etc.
I used the Polygon feature in Tableau to build out this chart. As I have mentioned before, the Polygon feature of Tableau really sets it apart from any other Data Visualization tool out there, purely in visual terms, since you can essentially create anything as long as you can do the math to plot it out.
P.S. – I realized later on that I had left out 1 or 2 characters like Benjen Stark, Thoros of Myr, etc. that could have been included. Perhaps a section for the Dragons like what I did for the Direwolves. But I did not have the heart to do all the calculations I had to do to create this chart in Tableau all over again. Maybe at the end of the series next year!
Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! 🙂