Visualizing Places Anthony Bourdain Visited for His Shows on Map

Data Wrangling in R and Exploratory, and Visualization

Christine Zhang has put together a data for all the places (438) Anthony Bourdain has traveled to for his following TV shows.

• No Reservation
• Parts Unknown
• The Layover

It includes the following information for each episode.

• Location’s name
• Country
• Latitude and Longitude
• Show name
• Season number
• Show title name.

I love all his shows. They are, I think, one of the most influential and the most humanistic documentary shows in our era that introduced us various cultures and human lives through foods and cookings.

And I always wanted to see where he traveled to on a single map. So I have downloaded the data from the linked Github repository, and visualize it in Exploratory.

Here’s a list of the countries he had visited for his shows, though I have removed United States because the number is too high compared to other countries.

Y-Axis shows the number of the episodes. For example, he visited Italy 12 times, France 10 times, and so on.

Here’s the same information that is laid out on the world map.

The color indicates the number of the episodes. We can easily notice Italy and France are the two most frequent countries in Europe and China and Japan are the two most frequent ones in Asia.

Now, what I really wanted to do is to show his travel paths in each episode, and here it is.

The color indicates which show of the following three.

• No Reservation
• Parts Unknown
• The Layover

I used lines to connect between the locations he visited for each of the episode.

For some of the episodes, he traveled to just one location. But he often traveled to multiple locations, sometimes across multiple countries, for each of the episodes. For example, for an episode called ‘Asia Special: China & Japan’ of ‘No Reservation’, he traveled to Kisoji and Osaka in Japan, then Xi’an, Beijin, and Chengdu.

Regardless whether he traveled for a long distance in each episode or not, overall, he traveled to many many different places among different countries and continents.

Here are all the episodes in Asia.

Here are all the episodes in Europe and Middle East

Here are all the episodes in Africa.

Here is one for North America.

Here’s one for South America.

Here’s one for Down Under. Yes, he’s visited Antarctica, too!

Just by looking at all these locations makes me want to watch all the shows again! 😁

How to Prepare the Data

Now, I originally thought I could visualize this data on Map quickly. This data has only 438 rows at the end of the day.

But boy, was I wrong.

As with any data, regardless of whether it is big or not, it always requires some amount of data wrangling works before getting to the Visualization step.

Since all the data wrangling tasks I did are pretty common operations, I want to share what and how I prepared the data with Exploratory, which is basically a UI tool for R.

Here is a list of the data wrangling tasks.

1. Separate a single column with Longitude and Latitude into two different columns so that I can assign them to the Map viz.
2. Replace a title name for one episode with a correct one.
3. Recode some values in the Country column to correct countries.
4. Convert Country Names to Continent Names.
5. Unite Show, Season, Episode, and Title columns together so that I can use it as a unique id for each episode to make the line connecting only the locations in the same episode, not across the episodes.

1. Separate a single column with Longitude and Latitude

In order to visualize the data on the Map viz in Exploratory, we need to have Longitude and Latitude columns separately. But, the original data has them together in a single column like below.

But you can separate it into two different columns easily.

You can select:

Separate -> Separate to Columns by… -> Comma (,)

from the column header menu of the ‘coordinate’ column.

Then, we get the two columns, ‘lat’ and ‘long’.

2. Replace a title for one episode with a correct one

There is one episode that had a wrong value. As you see below, the 4th episode in the 2nd season of No Reservation’s should be about Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but it’s coded as Peru.

Given this is just for this one row, we can simply fix it by using ‘if_else’ function like below.

if_else(show  == "No Reservations" & season  == 2 & ep  == 4,
"Quebec", title)

3. Map some values in the Country column to correct countries

I wanted to see the number of times he had visited by country on Map. This is what I got first.

Since United States is the biggest, as I have expected, all the other countries look the same. So I filtered United States out.

And I got this.

Huh?

There are still blue circles on United States territory even after removing the episodes (rows) whose country is United States! What’s going on?

It turned out that these are states like California, Oregon, Washington, etc. For some reason, these episodes had the state names as the country names. So I needed to ‘recode’ them to the correct country (United States).

By the way, Sicily is another place that is coded as the country name so I needed to recode it to Italy.

Now, all the circles in the United States are gone.

And here is the map that shows the number of episodes he visited per country.

He’s visited Japan 13 times! I knew he visited there with a few episodes and I enjoyed watching all of them. But it didn’t occur to me that it was that many!

4. Country to Continent Mapping

By the way, this bar chart makes it easier to see which countries he did the shows for the most.

The Y-Axis is showing the number of unique episodes per country.

Italy is the highest, and France, China, Japan follow.

Now, I can generate Continent names based on the country names.

Select ‘Work with Text Data’ -> ‘Convert’ -> ‘Country’.

You just assign what the original value is, in this case, that is ‘Country Name’, and what do you want to convert to, in this case, that is ‘Continent’.

Then, assign this new ‘continent’ information to the Color like below.

Looks he’s repeatedly visited many Asian countries (Green).

5. Unite Show, Season, and Episode Columns together

I wanted to create a column that can be used as a unique identifier for each episode so that I can use it to draw a line between the locations for each episode on Map. This will show how far he traveled in each episode.

So, what we need to do is to unite Show, Season, Episode, and Title columns.

Select these four columns and select ‘Unite’ from the column header menu.

Now, the data is ready to be visualized! 🎊

How to Visualize the Data

Visualizing this data on Map is pretty straightforward in Exploratory. But there is one thing. How to draw those lines?

Let’s take a step by step.

Visualize on Map

Under Viz view, we can select ‘Map — Long/Lat’ chart type, which would automatically map ‘long’ and ‘lat’ columns appropriately. Assigning Show column to Color By will give us a map like below.

Now, switch the marker to ‘Circle + Line’ under the Size Setting property.

As you can see though, the lines look crazy. That’s because each line tries to connect all the locations for each group of the Color.

To fix this, we can assign the previously created ‘show_season_episode_title’ column to Label.

Then, check ‘Split lines by Label column’ in the chart property.

This will make the line to connect only for those that are in the same episodes.

And this is how I have prepared the data and visualized it on Map! 🔥

Closing…

When I heard about his death, I was deeply shocked, disappointed, and saddened, like many millions of people who were touched by the genuine and authentic character he carried through all the shows and episodes.

There are so many episodes I can talk about for hours. The thing I find his shows so unique and authentic is his approach to the culture he introduced to the world. He accepts things the way they are and finds something that makes them unique, something that needs to be told and shared, some values that need to be introduced to the world that has not recognized yet.

His straight-no-bull-shit talk was always wrapped by his genuine love and curiosity towards something different, unique foods, unique culture, unique people, unique other things. By watching his shows, I felt like I’ve experienced not just the food and locations he introduced but also the various values, cultures, and the way people live in their regular days.

I’m still sad and will continue to miss him a lot. But at the same time, I’m grateful that I could experience the world that Anthony Bourdain introduced. He has definitely left a great mark on me that will be carried through as I move forward with my life.

With that, I’d like to leave one of his quotes and close this post.

“I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Try it for yourself!

If you want to try this out quickly, you can download the data from here, import it in Exploratory Desktop, and follow the steps.

If you don’t have Exploratory Desktop yet, you can sign up from here for 30 days free trial!

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