bedrio/d3-tennis-data-visualization

The Domination of the Big 3 in Tennis.

Team Members:

Arya Tawde, Bader Rifai

Overview:

The project seeks to illustrate visually the domination of the Big 3 of Men’s tennis, a three- era defining geniuses who happened to co-exist and dominated the field. We use statistics such as their grand slam records, particular surface domination, head to head scores, to highlight their stylistic differences and show the completely different ways the 3 dominate. We capture the narrative of the last two decades of men’s tennis by showing three players who were each world no 1 as the game evolved and their respective styles suited it more. We use different charts to demonstrate their different fields of domination, mental in the case of Djokovic, power and athleticism in the case of Nadal and the longevity and consistency of Federer.

Data description

We use multiple datasets for our project though most of our data is sourced from the Wikipedia page of the Open Era Men’s singles records at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Era_tennis_records_%E2%80%93_men%27s_singles] as well as [https://www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com/.] We created individual datasets for each graph and while the ones which showed their domination of slams (20 each) is common the data has very low cardinality in general because of their differing skills. The data was preprocessed as we basically hand extracted the values from the websites since they are undisputable, and only kept the values which were necessary for our charts.

Goals and Tasks

Our intended task was to demonstrate the sheer absurdity of the domination of the big 3, the nature of it which was never seen before in men’s tennis. Highlighting their differences was another major goal as it was important to note that it wasn’t that they were all cut from the same template but rather were extremely driven and talented individuals who managed to develop their talent in a unique way that maximized their potential.

Idioms

Our interface starts with the big 3 as individuals, and how historically their domination has set all three apart from the field. The visualization highlights their differences based on their preferred surfaces. We then dive into their individual strengths as each graph depicts one’s edge over the others and the field as well as why they occupy those top spots. Most of the charts are scientific, they just demonstrate hard data, their statistics speak for themselves. By highlighting their achievements we are technically filtering, however they do all three occupy the highest positions in nearly all records so our decision to focus on them isn’t really arbitrary. Chart 1 Demonstrates the Immortal Grace of Federer, his longevity and consistency in the sport. Chart 2 Shows the physical power and spin of Nadal’s ball that makes him a beast on clay by potting its trajectory against the others. Chart 3 shows the mental strength of Djokovic as his amazing W/L record is highlighted, superior even to the never die attitude of Nadal. Chart 4 demonstrates their surface domination Chart 5 demonstrates their dominance over the ages and how unexpected it was.

Reflection

A major shift for our project was a lack of man-power since one of our members dropped out of the class early in the project's conception. Since this reduced us to a team of two the substantial work increase on both of us forced us to cut some more advanced features we wanted to implement. We were however able to weave a fairly good narrative which became more clearly formed as our work progressed. An approach which first described their effect as a group and then highlighted their differences made for a good framework to design our graphs. We feel like our original proposal was fairly realistc since one of us had a good grasp of gui and knew the general limits of what was possible. One thing we would do differently the second time around is have a more consistent structure for the way we design our graphs so that we could apply changes across graphs more easily.

Team workload

While we both contributed to some extent in everything we did, we did divide our responsibilities based on our individual strengths. Arya was responsible for coming up with the idioms, chart ideas, and creating datasets for the charts since he had a better grasp of the field(tennis). Bader wrote a primary bulk of the code. However we regularly discussed our work and our contributions were not entirely skewed with both contributing to the others responsibilities occasionally. This made it easier for us to ensure that the idioms were implemented without too much friction.