Brief
With Anime growing more popular in the West, it’s time to dive into data collected from myanimelist.net.
It contains over 5000 unique Anime’s, 100,000 users and 8,000,000 lists with ratings.
- The challenge: can you find a cool story in this data?
- Tools: Tableau
- Exploration/Cleaning/Reshaping: any tool you like
Planning Stage
I found this challenge particularly fun as it involved a topic I was interested in, which had its pros and cons. On one hand, I was extra motivated to find out insights and create a story I had more of a connection to. On the other hand, this resulted in a lot of time brainstorming different ideas with a lack of direction. Initially, I aimed to create a visual timeline with points that highlighted key moments in anime history. However, I realised as I was making sketches, this was a little too much to tackle within the time frame of the challenge. Therefore, I switched my focus from a broad exploratory view to a more specific story.
I decided to narrow down and focus on one anime show and compare it to other shows adapted from manga. That anime, being the very first one I watched, is Naruto. The story of my dashboard is to convince viewers that Naruto is one of the best anime shows out there to watch. To make this argument, I considered assessing the following categories:
- Popularity
- Rating/Score
- Rewatchability
- Broad appeal
Data Prep
There were three datasets for this challenge, as listed below.:
- anime_cleaned.csv: info about anime
- user_cleaned.csv: user info
- animelists_cleaned.csv: info about users watching an anime
Some data prep in Tableau Prep was required to calculate airing start and end dates, user age, and to remove unnecessary fields. I also added semantics for the my_status column and split out genres, but these were not used in the final dashboard. The three datasets were linked together in Tableau using relationships using anime_id and username.
Future Improvements
Below are some improvements that could be made, as this is a project I would like to continue developing in the future. Although I spent a bit more time on my design skills this week, this is a project I can see myself expanding my creativity with.
- More LOD calculations to allow comparisons
- Implement interactivity to allow users to compare anime of their choice to Naruto
- Add cover images of anime using the provided URL