September 21, 2011

Brownlow Medal Winners Visualization

In my spare time I've been teaching myself D3, the splendid JavaScript visualization toolkit, so when I saw Edward Clement Lee's Empires visualization I was inspired to create my first D3 visualization.

With Edward's permission I repurposed his code to visualize the Brownlow Medal winners list using data from the AFL and Wikipedia. If you have a modern browser (recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari and maybe IE10) then you can use the interactive version.  Otherwise, you'll have to make do with the images below.

What I like about Edward's visualization is the ability to reposition and resize the bars.  Applied to the Brownlow Medallists this allows you to compare such things as the lengths of players' careers, when in their careers they were awarded their medals, what percentage of the medal vote they captured and so on.

Try it yourself (full-screen works best) or see the images below (click the images for high-resolution versions).

Update: Sept. 27, 2011
  • Added Dane Swan - winner 2011
  • Source-code is available via GitHub