Posts tagged: eurovision

My last post explored using the {tidymodels} package with data about the Eurovision Song Contest1. One of the best things to do when exploring a dataset is to visualise it, so let’s also use this dataset to learn about the {gganimate} package that provides ways to create animated charts. We’ll reuse the eurovision_scores dataset produced from the code in my last post. First let’s take a look at UK performance over time, we also need to filter out data from 1991 where Sweden and France both gained 146 points (but due to the complex rules in place at the time Sweden won, however under the current rules France would have won).

Last Saturday, Saturday 16th May 2020 was scheduled to be the 65th Eurovision Song Contest, but due to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic the contest was cancelled. Eurovision is very special to me, and I’ve been lucky to attend a couple of the finals and semi-finals – and, if you were watching the second semi-final of the 2015 contest you may have even seen me on TV! I’ve recently watched some of Julia Silge’s TidyTuesday webcasts using the {tidymodels} framework, and so instead of watching the EBU’s tribute show and getting rather sad about the contest not happening and Daði Freyr not winning and giving me an even better excuse to go back to Iceland1 I decided to play with {tidymodels} and the Datagraver’s Eurovision points dataset on Kaggle.