Finding Story through Data


For this week’s assignment I wanted to concentrate my previous visual story “The Rise of Burningman” from The Washington Post. I’ve collected my JSON data from GoogleTrends. 

Trends adjusts search data to make comparisons between terms easier. In my case my search term was “Burning Man Event”. For some of my questions, I’ve used “Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival”.  Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents, to compare relative popularity.

The resulting numbers then get scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topics proportion to all searches.

I’ve loaded my JSON data in to Observable and found these information about my story. 

Questions:

  • How did the popularity of burning man uprise over years?

  • Interest over time for Burning Man festival?

Google Trends

Google Trends

Observable (multiTimeLineBurning)

Observable (multiTimeLineBurning)

OBSERVATION :

It was interesting to see that I can not make a search earlier than 2014. Regarding to my question, I’ve come to solution that The Burning Man festival is more frequently searched in August which is the month of the event. The most popular event was the Burning Man 2014 regarding to the search queries. Overall, it is evenly distributed over the years.

Here is a link of my Observable;

Popularity over years

  • Top Burning Man Subjects related search queries?

  • What did people search more about Burning Man?

Google Trends

Google Trends

Observable(relatedEntities)

Observable(relatedEntities)

OBSERVATION :

It was interesting to see people search more of a specific Burning Man event with years. Regarding to my data, people have searched queries like;

Tent, Black Rock Desert, Flume, Principle, Art Car, Sculpture, Reno, Nevada, Cost.. Which mostly represent the location of event and some of them were the needs of event attendees.

It was sad to have not much of a data on this one. My total data length was 12.

Here is a link of my Observable;

Related Entities

  • Burning Man popularity compared to Coachella?

Screen Shot 2020-11-04 at 1.55.04 PM.png
Observable(multiTimeline)

Observable(multiTimeline)

OBSERVATION :

It was interesting to see that Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival has been searched much more than Burning Man over the years. Regarding to my question, I’ve come to solution that Coachella is more popular than Burning man. They both searched in the month of the event where we can see Burning man in on August whereas Coachella event in April. Overall, whereas Burnin Man festival is evenly distributed over the years, Coachella festival increased it’s popularity starting from 2009.

Here is a link of my Observable;

Burning Man VS Coachella

  • Interest for Burning Man depending on Subregion in USA.

Google Trends

Google Trends

Observable(geoMap)

Observable(geoMap)

OBSERVATION :

Burning Man was being searched more likely in Nevada with 100 scale where the festival is taking place. After that, it has been searched in the below subregions respectively;

-California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana….

We can say that Burning Man is mostly searched in it’s surrounding areas.

Here is a link of my Observable;

Subregional Search