Exploring The Michelin Guide's U.S. Restaurants

Michelin’s CA Guide was released recently.

This is a perfect time to unveil the Power BI dashboard I built based on Michelin Star ratings of the 4 US Guides (New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and California):

(to see in full-page view, click the expand arrows in the bottom right-hand corner).

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the boring process of compiling and editing the data, but I’ll note a few things.The data goes back to 2006 and up through 2019. I compiled data from Wikipedia, the Michelin website, restaurant websites, Yelp, and various publications. I did a lot of manual editing and refining. I had to make choices. For instance, if a restaurant has changed addresses, I used the latest address; however, I tagged any executive chef or owner I could find who has ever been at a restaurant, not merely the latest ones. If you’d like to learn about the data set or my process, just ask.

 OK, on to the good stuff!

There are 2 Pages.

Page 1

Page 1 is the restaurant select and map page. The top of the page contains a series of filters that allow you to narrow down the restaurants: U.S. Guide, Guide Year, Star Rating, Open/Closed Status, and finally, whether I’ve ever been to the restaurant:

Restaurant Select Filters

There are also two text Search & Select filter windows on the right—one for Restaurant Name and one for Chef/Owner. If you type any string of characters into one of the search bars, only the results containing that string of text will appear in the box below. The rest of the values will be filtered out.  Clicking on one or more of these results will filter the data on the entire page.

For instance, if you type “Sushi” into the Restaurant Search & Select bar, all Michelin-starred restaurants with names that include the word “Sushi” will appear in the search list space; you can then select those restaurants to filter the data. To clear the selections, click on the faint blue “Clear All” to the right of the search bar.

Restaurant Search & Select Box

You can do the same search and filter function for the name of the Chef or owner of the restaurants.

On the map, hovering over each of the dots will cause a tooltip mini-chart to appear. This mini-chart contains the highlighted restaurant’s name, address, neighborhood/area, and a line graph depicting the number of Michelin Stars the restaurant received in each year’s guide.

Clicking on one of the map’s dots populates the restaurant information in the box on the right, including the selected restaurant’s website url (unless the restaurant has permanently closed, the link should be active). 


Page 2

On the 2nd page, there is a stacked bar chart showing the total number of restaurants with each star rating by year as well as a table showing every restaurant and their star ratings over time. Clicking on any segment of the bars in the chart filters the restaurants in the table. This page also has the same filters at the top as those on Page 1.

There are also restaurant website urls hidden in the table hierarchy. These urls are active links (if the restaurants are still open). To drill down to the urls, simply right click on the Name header, then select Expand to next level.


Restaurant url drilldown

To hide the urls again, right click on the Name header again, and select

Restaurant Website url drillup

Andrew Heiss' Job Application Visualization & The Hermann Grid Illusion

Congratulations to academic Andrew Heiss, who recently got a job as an assistant professor in George State University’s School of Public Policy. He applied for almost 200 jobs over 2 and a half years before getting the offer he accepted. He used R to compile and visualize his data in this post.

job offer data.jpg

I chose to highlight Heiss’ project because it’s an effective use of personal data to tell a story : in this case how brutal the academic job market is in his field.

However; I also wanted to talk about the fact that his main visualization, the waffle chart detailing each of his rejections and offers, contains a well-known optical illusion called the Hermann grid illusion

illusion black.jpg

This illusion describes the weird, ghostly grey dots that seem to appear at the intersection of the grids between a series of boxes. I try to avoid creating visualizations that produce optical illusions — they can lead to headaches, eye aches, and nausea in some people.

Source: http://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2018/12/17...

Reproducing Visual Capitalist's Animated World GDP Visualization

I recently came across this animated bar chart from visualcapitalist. It depicts the top 10 GDPs (in US Dollars) in each year over the last several decades:

I took the GDP data from OECD* and replicated the visualization in Power BI using a custom visualization called Play Axis. For the sake of comparison, I also made an animated bubble map using the custom Mapbox Visual, along with a more standard line chart that showed each of the highlighted countries' change over time. These alternates are on pages 2 and 3.

gdp power bi 2.png

The animated charts are interesting and dynamic: they show the countries' many changes and jostling of positions over time. They're great for storytelling; however, in visualizing the data in this way, the audience loses the ability to track a country over time at any given point.

*Note: there's some discrepancy between the OECD data I used and the data the creator of the visualcapitalist bar chart used.

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/animation...

Gartner Magic Quadrant Animated Visualization

Earlier this year, Business IT research company Gartner released their annual Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. At my job, I presented on Gartner’s ratings of Microsoft (Power BI) and Tableau, and the research inspired me to use Power BI to visualize an interactive, animated history of the vendors in the Magic Quadrant since 2008. A few highlights:

1. Clicking the play button at the bottom of the chart shows you an animated view of the data over the last decade.


2. If you click on any individual dot/vendor (you can also hold shift to select multiple vendors), you can see the path traced out by over time.


3. You can select a range of years or individual years to filter the data.


4. You can also filter the data by Quadrant Classification: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, or Niche Players.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3861464/magic-...

Visualizing Trips Using Flourish

My wife and I love to travel. Over the past two decades, I’ve been documenting our travels and looking for ways to visualize the trips. I’ve used Carto and Tableau in the past, but recently, I’ve been working with Power BI and data journalism-friendly platform Flourish. I used Flourish to create these animated maps. It’s pretty user-friendly, but somewhat limited.

Flourish is the most powerful platform for data visualisation and storytelling