Spent a bit of the bank holiday weekend having a play with Desert Island Discs data. Have been thinking about creating a map visualisation of the guest data for while, often while doing laps at the lido, finally spent a few hours building something.
DID Guest Data Vis is an interactive fullscreen map portraying the 80+ year timeline and global distribution of BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs shows.
All castaways are geocoded by their birthplaces and plotted dynamically on a Leaflet canvas, color-coded by their broadcast decade. When clicked, a panel slides in from the right, displaying their official BBC sounds portrait, a biographical summary, and direct links to listen on BBC Sounds or read on Wikipedia.
All content has come from BBC DID website, Wikipedia and WikiData. This page was created using Antigravity.
The majority of the effort went into creating a dataset that included birth place of the guest. Various data scrapers are in the GitHub repo but they use a mix of the programme RSS feed plus some archive data on wikipedia. I learnt through this process that the BBC RSS feed is excellent, but is limited to the most recent 2000 entries (compared to the 3800+ shows that have actually aired). I particularly enjoyed the challenge of working out things like how to plot lots of shows that are all in one location - e.g. London, which locates at Trafalgar Square (I used a spriral plot) and where to put entries that don’t have any obvious birth place data (I plot all of these at -14,-13 lat long on an imaginary Desert Island and will slowly add these in manually).
Some screenshots are below.
Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week: