This is the final project for my Data Visualization class. I used Tableau and Microsoft Excel to complete the project.

​

This project, much like life itself, is not about the end so much as about the journey. The book for this class, Andy Kirk's 2nd Edition Data Visualisation framework seemed to work quite well, however; I was stuck in the formulating your brief step much longer than expected.

​

I ended up gathering data related to the places of interest that people might go to when camping. This project came about because of my personal curiosity about camping options and could be helpful for others who are interested in camping too. Time constraints played a part in this project partially due to my difficulty identifying the best approach for this project. Data accessibility was also a constraint.

​

The three sources for the data for this project came from Wikipedia, National Park Service, and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Data cleaning was necessary due to inconsistent date formats and a date range between the year 1872 and 2020. Wikipedia data included images which were removed. I also added a state column to the Wikipedia data to enable joining this table with the National Park data. I extracted only National Park data from a table of over 400 combined national park types for additional detail examination because it was the largest national park type that would likely include places that people might go camping. I also created a table to combine weather data from NOAA and the 2021 visitation numbers by month for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to assist with trip planning to the most popular National Park in the US.

​

The information from this class and the book is helpful for defining projects, assisting in identifying and highlighting areas that are significant, and especially speeding up the time to intelligence. Time to intelligence is significant today in the work world because the decision makers have so many aspects to consider and minimal time to make critical business decisions, especially since the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic.