Process

As soon as I learned this project involved finding our own data set, I knew I wanted to use our soccer statistics. These are numbers I look at every week anyway, and there’s quite a bit of information there. The most intuitive way to sort our team data was by class, and that’s when I realized there was potential to misrepresent the data because of the huge differences in class size.

I started by totaling stats for each grade in each category and creating the simple plots shown on the left hand side of the Intention section. It was clear that the sophomores dominated each statistic, but this was not an interesting or beautiful representation at all. So I decided to create the bubble plots, which show more dramatically (and aesthetically) the differences.

One of the challenges I encountered was that for some of the data sets, particularly game winning goals, the values were too small to show any meaningful differences in circle size. So, I decided to scale all the radii by the same scale factor. This maintained the relative sizes but made the bubbles easier to see and read.