It’s basically a merging of geography and time. Starting with geography, the map shows the area in Ohio in which all the meets took place. I used a road map for the style/symbols and placed googlemap-type markers for the meets. Each marker is sized proportionately by the number of runners in the race (jr high grade girls). Next to each marker is detail indicating the number of runners in the race and what place the Yellow Springs team came in (when they had enough runners to quality for team competition). For the time dimension, I loaded Lois’ times in excel and generated a line chart, which I placed where it would have least overlap with the map elements. The Y axis is finish time and the X axis is calendar date. Each node on the timeline has a number that indicates Lois’ finish time and the size of each node indicates the proportion of the field the finished ahead of (the larger the circle, the greater % of field she beat). The detail numbers next to each node include her finish time and a value that indicates the proportion-of-field she beat (I caculated finish position divided by field size. I should have used a percentile for this but somehow didn’t think of that, maybe because it was getting to be the wee hours of the morning). I used the thin lines/arrows to associate each time node with its corresponding meet location marker. I wasn’t sure how effective that would be but it’s kind of essential in order to understand the story. The orange town names are kind of a historical reference to the teams we played when I coached her traveling basketball team in grade school).

It was fun having her guess what it all meant. She pretty much got it, but it took a little longer to figure out what the time-node sizes meant. It was definitely a fun project, and I’m glad I got to share it at vizthink – I knew people there would appreciate it – at least the attempt!