Up For Some Tableau in The Office? That’s What She Said!

Last summer I worked with a Game of thrones dataset for a visualization project. I was planning to revisit that dataset to unravel some more mysteries, when it occurred to me that I should look for something similar with my current favorite – The Office.

I found this wonderful dataset of lines from the show. It has dimensions like Speaker and Seasons making it a tempting dataset for a Tableau exercise. The first thing that came to mind was to get into Michael’s business – That’s What She Said!

Nothing surprising here – Michael obviously stands out! I was also interested in looking at the lines from a sentiment analysis point of view. It turns out that not many people laugh in the show (at least that’s what the script says). An analysis of the lines revealed some unusual observations –

  • Angela talks more than Oscar, and Toby talks more than Stanley
  • Dwight laughs more than Pam, and Toby more than Oscar

Looking at both these dashboards together, you can see that –

  • Season 4 has the maximum number of “That’s what she said”s but the lowest lines with characters laughing.

You can find the dashboard on my github page. I wanted to explore this further but I came across this amazing Tableau Public workbook, and this brilliant article where the author goes into data mining with R and word frequencies and character correlations. These are great inspirations for me to explore some other datasets and come up with interesting insights and dashboards.