✈️ What I’m Hoping to Learn at TC25
I’m heading to the Tableau Conference in San Diego with a mission that’s part data inquisitor, part historian: In addition to learning about how to build the best charts and dashboards for business, I also want to learn how to better use Tableau to bring historical data to life—especially to visualize events like WWII missions in ways that are meaningful, educational, and unforgettable.
For quite some time, I’ve been exploring my WWII Veteran father’s 320th Bomb Group mission archive, an old-school HTML site filled with rich but unstructured historical data. My dream? I want to use Tableau to map missions, build timelines, and ultimately create an interactive experience that preserves the legacy of my dad and his fellow servicemen.
Here’s a look at a few of the sessions I plan to attend—and why they’re on my radar.
I🔍 Top Sessions to Help Me Visualize History with Tableau
1. Feast on Data: Digging into Advanced Viz Techniques
🕑 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Day 2
✅ Why I’m Going: This session dives into advanced table calculations—which might come in handy to visualize complex historical data (e.g., airstrike dates, locations, and outcomes).
2. Tableau Prep: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
🕛 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Day 2
✅ Why I’m Going: The WWII missions data isn’t exactly “clean.” It’s HTML tables and text—so this session will help me streamline that raw content into Tableau-ready formats using Prep.
3. Map It Like It's Hot
🕛 12:00 PM – 12:40 PM, Day 1
✅ Why I’m Going: Mapping is central to the story I want to tell—each mission has a location and a trajectory. This session should help refine my map design skills, especially around formatting and interactivity. Optimizing map performance for enhanced user experience and storytelling will be valuable to learn.
4. Beyond the Boundaries of Tableau
🕑 2:00 PM – 2:40 PM, Day 1
✅ Why I’m Going: I want to push Tableau to do more than just show data—I want it to tell stories. This session promises inspiration for going beyond the default charts. And LaDataViz, with Tristan Guillevin as the presenter, will be sure to dazzle!
5. Tableau Speed Tipping: 40 Tips in 40 Minutes
🕚 11:00 AM – 11:40 AM, Day 1
✅ Why I’m Going: A rapid-fire session full of golden nuggets that could unlock faster, more intuitive ways to build out visualizations.
🧠 The Big Goal: A WWII Storytelling Dashboard
By the end of the conference, I want to draft a roadmap for a project that looks something like this:
✅ Scrape and clean data from the 320th Bomb Group mission logs
🗺️ Map missions by date, location, and type using Tableau’s spatial features
📆 Build a timeline view of key mission events with tooltips and contextual annotations
🧵 Tie in narratives (quotes, excerpts) from the original website to humanize the data
🌍 Publish an interactive dashboard that’s accessible, educational, and honors history
🔜 What's Next?
After TC25, I’ll eventually blog again with lessons learned, favorite features, and maybe even a sneak peek at my WWII visualization project. In the meantime, if you’re passionate about history and data storytelling or you’ve done a similar project—let’s connect! I’d love to hear how you approach bringing the past to life with data.
