• One of first few attempts to compare changes in female participation in the Summer Olympics over 120 years in different continents. This new insight will be important because although data shows that overall female participation in the Olympics has been increasing dramatically, this might have been the case for each continent. Further investigation into the percentage of female athletes in each of the six continents (Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America, and Oceania) will reveal deeper information about the trend of female athletes participation.

• Introducing KDE in examining home-field advantage in the Olympics. This method makes it possible to show the density of each host country’s performance distribution, which makes the comparison between “home” and “away” performance clearer.

• Introduction of the concept of “medal efficiency”. Earlier attempts either lacked taking into account of “medal points” or unfairly included GDP and population in their formula. Our way of calculating medal efficiency, i.e., weighted medal points per athlete participating, can more accurately estimate each country’s efficiency of producing medals in the Summer Olympics.

The main data set used in this project is the awesome Olympic_history by rgriff23.

Other complementary data sets:

• continent.csv is used for extracting the ISO-3166 three letter country code and the corresponding continent name.

• host_countries.csv is used in vis 3.

• continent_4.xlsx is used to extract the IOC (International Olympic Committee) country codes and the ISO-3166 three letter country codes. We merge continent_4 with continent to get the corresponding continent name of each IOC code. We then merge this with summer.csv to produce continent_percentage_tidy and continent_percentage_untidy, two of which we used to visualize changes in female particiation in the Olympics in different continents.

For more detailed information about our data sources, and our codes for data manipulation and visualization, please check out our olymvis-data repository on GitHub.

Chris Fang earned his Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems (General) from Kelly School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington, where is now a Master’s student majoring in the same field. He is always passionate to engage in hands-on projects to gain a more comprehensive understanding of technology utilization in different industries. Some interesting projects he has done are database system configuration for city hall, web database development for local non-profit, prediction model and visualization for stock data analysis in Python, OCR prototyping with ABBYY.

Hongtao Hao graduated with a Master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the Media School of Indiana University in 2020, advised by Dr. Nicole Martins. He is currently working as a research assistant at YY Lab for Professor Yong-Yeol Ahn. He earned his first Master’s degree in Journalism from Renmin University of China, Beijing. You can view his journalism pieces in St.Gallen Symposium Magazine. He is a fan of The Three-Body Problem. The most memorable experience he had is attending the 47th St.Gallen Symposium in 2017.

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You can find the source code of this website here.

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