Origins

Hello there and thank you for stumbling across my very first blog post! 

A little over a month ago, I attended the Tableau Customer Conference and was inspired by a presentation titled 'Porn, Pokemon, and Pop Culture' - all about using Tableau Public and a number of data scraping tools and techniques to satisfy the itch to get creative with data presentation (at least that's what I got out of it). I finally had a chance to sit down and test what I learned, and I'm pretty excited (also a bit nervous, truth be told) to share it with you. Without further ado, here's me partying with my data (as all the TCC shirts say):

I happened across a pretty amazing superhero database, cleverly named Superhero Database and thought it would be a great dataset with which to experiment. As recommended in the previously mentioned preso, I used import.io to collect the data points I wanted, plus some extras just for funsies, from each character page. The web crawler tool is amazing, more on that later. Did a bit of manual clean up, and then made a little map to show us the origins of many of our favorite heroes and villains. A little disclaimer: due to my manual tinkering and some gaps in the data, you may not see your favorite character. Also, I may have taken some liberties with the location of a few fictional or at least debatable cities (e.g., Gotham City, Atlantis) - please don't come after me, it's all just for fun, right?

Also, big thanks to Jewel Loree, Paint by Numbers, and VizWiz for the very informative and inspiring presentation. 

Any comments or questions on what I did here? Let me know - I'd love to hear from you!

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