For this project, I scraped data from DoesTheDogDie.com, an internet database of movies, rated based on how the pets in the film fare. The dataset is ~670 points.
Here is a stacked bar chart, where each stack represents animals in the movies released that year. Blue represents animals that were still happy by the end of the film, grey represents animals that weren’t so happy, and red represents animals that died. Thanks, DoesTheDogDiecom! At least the percentage of movies with happy animals seems to be increasing.
(neither media upload nor wordpress d3 seem to be working, so here’s my visualization, hosted on my own site: here)
Originally, I tried to scrape the site using Kimono, but I wasn’t receiving reliable data. Then, I tried to use the Beautiful Soup Python library, but because DoesTheDogDie isn’t formatted well, I couldn’t easily grab the parts I was interested in.
So, long story short, I wrote a bunch of small python scripts that kept going over the data until I had a format I liked.
Next, the visualization. I felt so lost looking for complete tutorials. What I ended up doing was finding an example that fit what I was trying to do, and walking myself through building something similar that would work for me. I modified several aspects of the graph’s presentation, the format that it would accept in order to read my data, and the sorting of the bars. The example graph sorted based on total height, and I wanted mine to be chronological.