Hilltop Analytics

A 3D Lake District in R and Rayshader

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If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that I’ve got quite excited about a new R package called Rayshader. It lets you do similar things to my terrain shading efforts in Google Earth, but with much more control and cooler looking output. In the UK, we’re lucky to have the OS terrain 50 dataset,…

Using R to add custom layers to Google Earth

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Google Earth is amazing and with a little bit of effort, it can also be a brilliant platform for 3D data visualisation. Adding data to Google Earth isn’t too tough, especially now that the Pro version is free. Its KML files provide an XML based format to draw lines and polygons, apply raster images to…

Mapping Premier League player’s birthplaces

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As part of my Chalkboard project, I assembled data on a large number of football squads. Sometimes with a project like this you end up with more data than you need and so I found myself with a database of players’ birthplaces. Where were this season’s Premier League players born? They come from all over the…

Mapping the football analytics network

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Twitter has a lively (and occasionally argumentative) football analytics community, encompassing a wide variety of amateur analysts, professionals, coaches, journalists, scouts and pundits. Today’s post is a new version of my visualisation of the community and the connected individuals within it. James Yorke dubbed the first version of this project the “Ego Viz”, which I rather like….

It’s the little differences: Useful football heat maps

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If you’ve been following my recent football posts, you’ll know that I’ve been playing with small multiples visualisations of shot location and chance creation. I want to visualise possession in a similar way, but try to really highlight the differences between teams. We all know that a game of football is mostly played in midfield, but rather…