Dashboard Week Day 2 – Star Wars API

April 27, 2022

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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Today is day 2 in dashboard week. We used Star Wars API data and made a Viz.

API Introduction

We got this Star Wars API from here, and it is the quantified and programmatically formatted set of Star Wars data. This API contains all the People, Films, Species, Starships, Vehicles and Planets from Star Wars film series 1 to 6. The data has been formatted in JSON and exposed it to us in a RESTish implementation that allows us to programmatically collect and measure the data.

Data Preparation

This API documentation is very straightforward and easy to understand. There are 6 tables need to be done from the API requests and we distributed these tasks among group members.

I used “Generate Rows” tool and append the character IDs into the input URL to get the full URL for each character and then download the URLs and used Jason Parse to parse the download data. Same method can be applied for getting other tables.

Dashboard (Interactive Viz)

Relationships have been used in tableau desktop to blend the tables and I used the full URL as the primary key for each table.

Below are 3 core components to my dashboard,

Character information exploration (including names, eye colour, height, mass, species, skin colour, gender, hair colour, birth year and their home planets)

Language popularity by classification (evaluated by the number of characters who speak this language)
Height and age analysis by classification

Interesting findings:

Only few characters within the same classification use the same language, it’s hard for characters to communicate across the species. Therefore, they use radios and other communications devices, and the starships carries these units to broadcast distress signals and other important messages.
All Human are all below 100 years old and most of them are less than 2 meters, the tallest human is Darth Vader, and he is 202 cm. Both the oldest (Yoda) and the youngest character (Wicket W. Warrick) are mammals.

Reflections:

Good Aspects:

Managed to get the API data early, saved a lot of time for tableau dashboard building.
Great teamwork even we are doing individual Viz, we shared some images and interesting insights with each other.

Things to improve:

I should have used Alteryx to join the data instead of using tableau relationship, some relationships are not working well.
I am not familiar with the characters and the stories, need to watch all the films on this coming weekend!