Monday, 25 July 2016

Mundial Dialogue (Fun with Data)

This dialogue is an imaginary summary of at least a full day of faffing about trying to get the data together.

HEDGEHOG
Hello. I notice there is rather a lack of anything fact-based about how the Mundial actually works, the judging, and so on. I'd like to download all the published results from previous years and analyse them to see if I can say anything interesting about it.

MUNDIAL
Hello. We have a website that covers each year since 2009, and most of the results are probably there somewhere, except for 2009 when they aren't.

HEDGEHOG
Great, I can get all the files and mash up the data with Power Query.

MUNDIAL
We don't publish any individual judge scores, even for the semifinal or finals, before 2012.

HEDGEHOG
Not to worry. Four years is a good start.

MUNDIAL
Before 2012, the results are sensible tables. From 2012 onwards, the semi-finals and finals are just PDFs of pictures of the scores. We don't name the couples. For 2014 and 2015 we do name the couples, but seperately from the scores, and in different formats.

HEDGEHOG
I have access to some pretty good OCR technology, I have a great text editor, I know Regular Expressions, I have Power Query, and if it comes to that, I can put the PDF on my tablet on a book-chair and retype it all at 50wpm. I bet you named most of the couples in the classification rounds.

MUNDIAL
The links for the 2012 Final and Semifinal are broken. Those documents are just Error 404s.

HEDGEHOG
But I know exactly how these things work, and I can guess, by analogy with documents that are there,  that for the final, instead of http://www.tangobuenosaires.gov.ar/festivalymundial12/web/resources/FinalesTangoSalon.pdf
you meant http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/resources/FinalesTangoSalon.pdf. And for the Semifinal, instead of http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/es/Semifinal_Salon.pdf, you made a different mistake and you actually meant http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/resources/Semifinal_Salon.pdf.

MUNDIAL
Do you think this is a good idea?

HEDGEHOG
Do you think you're going to win this?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious!!! I especially love your last line, true hacker spirit :D !!!

BR, Uwe