Developing Data Products Course Project - The “Naptime” Graphic App

author: Eric Allen date: 9/19/2019 autosize: true

Creating your own version of “the most beautiful data visualization of all time”

From Data to Keepsake

Any new parent will always remember the first few months of their baby’s lives. In 2017 Australian Redditor, going by the handle “andrew_elliott”, created the data visualization below to capture the first six months of his baby’s life.

The purpose of this app is to allow anyone to create a similiar visulization of their baby’s experience.

Interpreting the Naptime Graphic

The example graphic above is based on randomly generated data (it’s an R expression that gets evaluated and displayed when rendering this presentation). *** - The spirals show a baby’s sleep status within 15 minute segments for a 24 hour period. 0/Blue indicates asleep and 1/Green indicates awake. Other values (most often red) indicate more than one sleep/wake cycle within the 15 minute period. (This could be interpreted as the baby’s fussy period.) - The outer ring of the graphic, which is wider, indicates the predicted probability of being asleep or awake during a particular segment within the next 24 hours based on data from the prior days.

How it functions

The user can select the date range you wish to focus on within the data.
The user can up upload thier own data in a comma delimited (*.csv) file (the app loads with example data)
- data must contain a header row of [“napt”,“event”]
- additional rows of sleep data containing a timestamp and event code (0 for ‘went to sleep’ and 1 for ‘woke up’)
- Event rows must be in the following format [YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,#] for example [2019-01-15 03:37:40,0].
(note: the square brackets [ ] in examples are not included in the actual data.)

Links, References and Credits

Links - The “Naptime” Graphic App (please give it 10-30 seconds to load initially) - Github Repository with app code and .Rpres file

References and Credits - Reddit post by Andrew Elliot - “Washington Post article on the graphic and Reddit user vote by Christopher Ingraham” - example baby sleep data from datasets gathered and cleaned up by Petra Isenberg, Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen - Very helpful post and response on StackOverflow on spiral graphics