With the Game of Thrones TV show ending, I thought it was about time to complete my death viz that I started a while back. Before we go on, there will be obvious spoilers for the final seasons.
If you are unfamiliar with my project, I decided to track every on screen death that happened in the show. If you read to the end you will see this data visualized and even be able to download a copy of the data for yourself! It started out as mere curiosity but ended up being an interesting data visualisation project, showing how making your own data sources can be fun and rewarding. If you’d like to know about about the process, check out this Tableau Blog post I made.
Due to 38% of the deaths occurring in the second to last episode, it blew out the scale and design of my previous dashboard. So once I completed collecting the data, I made an updated version to account for this.
The top section let’s you explore an individual character’s data; their cumulative kill counts through the seasons, total kills and the details of each one by hovering your mouse over the individual bubbles. The bottom section looks at the overall stats of the show; top killers ranked, most popular methods for dispatching people and the trends by episode. Clicking on any of these 3 charts will filter the other 2 for extra exploration.
I had to set a few rules when counting the on screen deaths, to keep things simple and consistent. So if my numbers don’t match up with your expectations, these could be the reasons why:
- The kill has to happen on screen. Dead bodies being seen don’t count. This also helps us avoid the messy and inaccurate realm of estimating battle casualties.
- The undead were not counted. It’s a grey area to know if they were alive (again) in the first place and whether or not they were killed or just incapacitated. It was a can of worms I didn’t want to open.
- Animals counting as weapons. My view is, without a character commanding an animal to kill, they wouldn’t have done so. The animal is an extension of the character, much like any other weapon. Plus it allows the main characters to be featured in the data more, as some heavily rely on animals to do their killing (dracarys!).
Up until now I’ve protected the data, making it unavailable for download, as it represented a considerable time investment for me to collect it all. But with the show finally over and my data viz complete, I’ve decided to share the data with everyone. Since I started running my own podcast on data visualization, I’ve been humbled and inspired by the data viz community all over again. I’m excited to share it with everyone and see what awesome creations and insights people come up with!
Click here to download the data @ data.world
If you create something from this data, please get in touch and share your creations with me on social media. I’d love to see and showcase them! Do you have any suggestions for other interesting data sets I could create? Did you find an interesting insight in the dashboard? Let me know in the comments below.
3 Responses
Hello David!
Great visualization and nice work for bringing this dataset together, kudos! I am just starting out with learning Tableau and I’m taking a course on Coursera where I’m supposed to create a dashboard. I came across your very interesting GOT dataset and I was intrigued. I downloaded it, keen to see what I could make out of it, but I have been stuck. Apparently, your dashboard is a tad bit complex for a newbie like me to replicate without any guidance. I would be grateful if you could give me a step-by-step tutorial on how you arrived at such an awesome viz (perhaps a Youtube link?). This would be a huge learning opportunity for me and I look forward to your positive response. I would make sure to give all the credit when and where due.
Cheers.
¡Hi David!
I love your proyect and I see that at the end you say that you share the data with everyone but I can’t find where to download it.
Cheers