I made a post about my McDonald's visualization on r/dataisbeautiful and received feedback in the form of Reddit comments about areas to
improve on for a more effective visualization.
One thing led to another, and now armed with knowledge of basic Wikipedia
scraping and R, I set out to visualize the spread of more companies.
Multiple commenters mentioned an interesting correlation between globalization
and the rate of expansion into other countries. This made me wonder if a company in the same sector like KFC
would have the same expansion pattern.
With a couple modifications to handle exceptions and formatting in each case,
my existing code could scrape any page with a HTML table showing the expansion timeline. After KFC,
I got to analyzing IKEA, Spotify and Apple Stores.
The script for these visualizations is based on my initial program. The KFC Wikipedia page separates the expansion into different regions. I had to use a function to iterate over all the tables and then combine them.
I made the Spotify plot next. All the countries that Spotify expanded to were grouped by date, so I used the
separate_rows()
function to split each country into its own row.
For IKEA and Apple Stores, the process was very similar. The data was read in, tidied up, then corrected for any mismatches and exceptions.
Since I based these off my existing code, there were no challenges in making them. The only variation was in the format of the data sets.
However, I had to abandon plotting expansion over month due to trouble with implementation.
Spotify is a recent company, so I originally planned to plot the expansion of Spotify by month instead of year. However, I
had difficulty getting my plotting function to iterate by month. Checking the month and year value before plotting also posed a
problem.
rvest
library to scrape a HTML tablestringr
package and the tidyverse
libraryrnaturalearth
, sf
and glue
librariesBe able to visualize interesting relationships and concepts in different units (months, days). Also to animate different kinds of data other than geographical expansion in R. I also hope to become more familiar with animated visualizations.