Mother of Invention

We have been planning on making a BI blog for some time.  Really – we have.  And there’s nothing like a push to get it started (and a snappy title to increase our hits from searching Zappa fans).

I’ve had great success using Tableau for my clients – mostly in the pharmaceutical industry.  I have been using it for over a year now and I’ve found it to be a quick development tool that provides a strong suite of analytic and visual options.  As I’ve been integrating into the Tableau community – using their forums, registering for their conference in November, I saw their challenge:

Create a visualization about politics.

That was too much to pass up – and the deadline for entry is today, which means I have to get this blog started in order to enter.  Necessity is truly the mother of invention.

I partnered with two of my colleagues, Rajul and Mehul, and we decided to investigate the relationship between demographics and donations.  We hear so much about the niches each candidate is holding – and they are so uniformly stated – the statistician in me knows it’s not true.  So, I wanted to look at the demographic trends in relation to donations – our only voting mechanism right now.

The geographer in me wanted to play with Tableau’s maps too – so I imported the Congressional District boundaries from the Census website.  After wrestling with MapInfo and Richard Leeke’s astounding import process, we have the following submission for their contest.

Now, I just need remember to post this link on Facebook so that  my wonderful mother will be my first comment (and follower)...

Carl

Here's the difference viz - click for the Obama page and here for the Romney page.

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