To try to bring a bit of focus back to this blog, I’ve started a new blog – F1 Data Junkie: http://f1datajunkie.blogspot.com (aka http://bit.ly/F1DataJunkie) – that will act as the home for my “procedural” F1 Data postings. I’ll still post the occasional thing here – for example, reviewing the howto behind some of the novel visualisations I’m working on (such as practice/qualification session utilisation charts, and race battle maps), but charts relating to particular races, will, in the main, go onto the new blog….
I’m hoping by the end of the season to have an automated route of generating different sorts of visual reviews of practice, qualification and race sessions based on both official timing data, and (hopefully) the McLaren telemetry data. (If anyone has managed to scrape and decode the Mecedes F1 live telemetry data and is willing to share it with me, that would be much appreciated:-)
I also hope to use the spirit of F1 to innovate like crazy on the visualisations as and when I get the chance; I think that there’s a lot of mileage still to come in innovative sports graphics/data visualisations*, not only for the stats geek fan, but also for sports journalists looking to uncover stories from the data that they may have missed during an event. And with a backlog of data going back years for many sports, there’s also the opportunity to revisit previous events and reinterpret them… Over this weekend, I’ve been hacking around a few old scripts to to to automate the production of various data formatters, as well as working on a couple of my very own visualisation types:-) So if you want to see what I’ve been up to, you should probably pop over to F1 Data Junkie, the blog… ;-)
*A lot of innovation is happening in live sports graphics for TV overlays, such as the Piero system developed by the BBC, or the HawkEye ball tracking system (the company behind it has just been bought by Sony, so I wonder if we’ll see the tech migrate into TVs, start to play a role in capturing data that crosses over in gaming (e.g. Play ALong With the Real World), or feed commercial data augmentations from Sony to viewers via widgets on Sony TVs…
There’ve also been recent innovations in sports graphics in the press and online. For example, seeing this interactive football chalkboard on the Guardian website, that lets you pull up, in a graphical way, stats reviews of recent and historical games, or this Daily Telegraph interactive that provides a Hawk-Eye analysis of the Ashes (is there an equivalent for The Master golf anywhere, I wonder, or Wimbledon tennis? See also Cricket visualisation tool), I wonder why there aren’t any interactive graphical viewers over recent and historical F1 data…. (or maybe there are? If you know of any – or know of any interesting visualisations around motorsport in general and F1 in particular, please let me know in the comments…:-)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 