[Entire Tableau Story Here]

I’ve always been interested in astrology, partly because I grew up in Vietnam, where most people would consult an astrologer or a feng shui consultant before buying a home, starting a business, or even getting married. After about 2 years of reading books on the subject and attempting to interpret charts of people around me, I have around 100 charts in my astro.com database that I would periodically inform the people on the list if some transits of the planets at that moment might affect their life.

However, I’ve never kept count of the number of different zodiac signs in my database, and that would be the first question I’m attempting to answer. “what is the count of each zodiac signs (sun sign)?” “How many of these are friends, family, or lovers?” “Is there a pattern in my love life?” These are my initial questions, but I would love to discover more, on this small sample, if there’s anything related to some of the astrology theories or studies out there. One of them is married couples usually have Sun-Moon, or Moon-Rising (Synchronicity by Jung), or lovers usually have their venuses or mars’s aspecting one another.

Given the tentative title and the scope of this project about quantified self, these visualizations will first satisfy my curiosity on the topic. I’m very curious to learn what the visuals will show. If there’s a pattern about anything, it might help to solidify my interest in astrology, given that I’m skeptical about the subject from time to time. Depending on the result of my findings, I may be able to give better readings to my family and friends in the future. Apart from that, astrology enthusiasts might be very interested in this sort of quantification approach to astrology.

As mentioned before, I’ve collected birth time, birthdays, and birthplaces of these people over time. I have an account on astro.com that lets me inputting this information for different variations of astrology charts, and these are recorded on the site as my database. I manually collect people’s sun signs, moon, rising, venus, mars, and mercury and created an excel sheet, along with their relationships to me, and a unique key for each of them. I’m focusing on the inner planets for this project since it would be too broad to cover the outer planets (Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn), and also because the inner planets are more unique to each person than the outer planets (generational planets) due to their shorter cycles. There are 94 observations, including myself, and 6 variables (relationship to self, sun, moon, ascendant, mercury, venus, mars).

The first chart is a treemap showing the sun signs occurring the most time of the 94 observations. Also, each box is split into smaller sections showing the total in each of my social circles. It turns out that the top 3 are Capricorn’s, Scorpio’s, and Libra’s. However, out of these three signs, there are 3 Capricorn’s and 3 Libra’s in my family. Because we are born to our family, this doesn’t suggest any pattern in particular about my family and me.

The next visuals then show the inner planets of my friends and me. I have 6 Scorpio friends on the list, and this placement matches my sun and ascendant. Also, looking at the total amount of signs for each element, across all 5 inner planets and the ascendant, there are more Earth and Water signs than Fire or Air. Fire comes in at third place and is not far from Water, but the total for Air signs is significantly lower than the top 2. With my chart being predominantly Water and Earth, with one planet in a Fire sign (Mercury in Sagittarius), these aggregate measures are understandable. Another thing worth noticing is the Mercury signs, with Sagittarius, the same sign as mine, occurring the most times. I’ve noticed in real life, that it is easier to communicate, in terms of tone, cadence, and texting styles, with friends who share the same mercury sign as mine, and this distribution of Mercury’s confirmed that (at least at the moment when the sample size is still small).

Moving on to the zodiacs of my past and present lovers, one thing that sticks out immediately is the ranking of the total amount of signs in each element is still the same as the previous graphs depicting friends’ signs. Total count of Earth signs is at least 11 more than the next element, with all the Earth signs (Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo) in the top 3 individual signs showing up the most across all 5 planets and the rising sign. Our venus sign suggest our sense of aesthetics, values, and what we are usually attracted to initially, while our mars sign tells us our modus operandi, and how we would react in general. These findings suggest that I’m more attracted to Earth signs, and since my Venus and Mars are both in an Earth sign (Capricorn), I’m convinced it’s true that I have a thing for Earth signs (my friends also agree with this). An outlier, in this case, would be the Aries Moon, which appears the most among the people I’ve dated. However, after checking the data, 4 out of 6 are actually Water or Earth Suns. Again, a sample size of 19 romantic relationships cannot guarantee definite patterns, but so far the signs from these charts have reaffirmed my enthusiasm for astrology.

*Notes on data and design choices:

[pre-pinup]The first thing I would like to note about the design is the color choice I’ve chosen for this project. Essentially, the stacked bar charts are ordered first by the element of the sign (Fire > Earth > Air > Water) since this is the original order of the zodiac and marks the start of each season. and then by the order of the sign within the order of its element (i.e. Aries > Leo > Sagittarius). Fire signs are colored as variations of the salmon color, shades of green of Earth, blue for Water, and grey for Air. The shades of these colors are darker in proportion to the order of the signs. I think this would be more helpful to visualize the data and identifying the signs rather than arranging them by ascending or descending, or grouping them in a default Tableau color palette.

For the first dashboard, I find that it would be more detailed and informative to include the “Relationship to self” variable in the “detail” panel, rather than including it in the tooltip. The zodiac symbols are placed in the biggest box of each sign, other than that the placements of the symbols have no underlying meaning.

The planet-comparisons for friends and lovers on the next two dashboards are very similar to each other, design-wise. My own placements are put on top, and others below, for comparison purposes. A lot of texts are displayed on these visuals, but I thought that it’s really hard for viewers to get what’s going on, without some background information on astrology (or if they’re curious what the planets represent).

[Post-pinup] After a lot of great feedback from classmates, I’ve decided to reorder the columns in the comparison dashboards. It was easier for my group to see what I’m getting at after I told them that about my color choices and that I put my own placements at the top along with their specific colors to match with the charts below them. Since I’ve put in explanations on the right about the compatibility of the elements, I arranged them according to the element that matches mine by that order, and after that, descending by sign counts. For each column, if the labels are repeated, only the first one is shown.

**Further steps:

I ran into problems with quantifying these data, and so that will be the first thing I would try to do to add in another story about match-making and observing the married couples in my data set. Furthermore, I was unable to find a way to group the bar charts together, since each of them contains a specific variable. It would be better if I was able to do a chart with 5 stacked bars for each planet, but since they’re all different variables I was unable to find a way to do so. I would have to show these to more people to find the best way to arrange these charts to minimize the amount of text I had put in, and for them to get what I’m trying to compare without having to explain my design choices.