Getting Dirty with Tableau – MTB Style

Early september I visited the Tableau Conference in Seattle. A session by Jewel Loree, Andy Kriebel and Peter Gilks with the inspiring name “Porn, Pokemon and Pop Culture” really got me pumped up and ready to make my first Tableau Public viz. It took me a while to find inspiration for a good viz and after trying out various topics ranging from a story on Trappist beer to a viz on the impact of sleep deprivation (I have a six month old daughter and two your old son) I received an action camera ahead of my upcoming birthday. I had seen a post by the great Ben Jones on embedding a Youtube video within Tableau Public and I was wondering if I could take this one step further and make the video responsive to interaction with the viz.

I’ve downloaded the data from my TomTom MultiSport Cardio watch in CSV format and removed all data before and after this lap to get a clean dataset. I’ve also removed a part in the middle of the track where I had a short break and you would be watching a couple of bikers standing around catching a breath (not a pretty sight). I did the same for the video using Apple’s iMovie. I know I also could have filtered this within Tableau but as this is being published to Tableau Public I chose to keep the data as clean as possible.

You can click on any mappoint along the track and the video will start from there. The charts will also update to show the speed, heart rate and crank cycles at that moment. You can do the same with the charts. I would love any and all feedback on how I could improve this viz and maybe someday become ‘viz of the day’. Feel free to use my data and video to create your own.

I have not been able to find a way to keep the map/chart updated as the video progresses, if you have any idea on how I could achieve this let me know (maybe the Tableau JavaScript API??)! Also the fonts I used within the viz also don’t render well within a browser and get substituted with a default font, not sure how to fix this.