Looking back on Women In Baseball Week

MICA commencement

I don't think I've had a summer as busy as this year's -- it has been a whirlwind of activity that I haven't experienced in a long time. My work at the National Library of Medicine continues to keep me busy, and the practice of customer experience management and data visualization continues to evolve in some very new and exciting ways. I'm also in my second year of teaching the Maryland Institute College of Art's data analytics and visualization program, where in May I went to commencement and saw the students that I taught last summer walk across the stage to receive their diplomas. It's a very unique feeling -- tinged with a great deal of joy and pride of course -- to witness the people who have worked so hard, and who have shared their work in the class you taught, finish their program and move on to the next challenge.

Teaching the practice of data visualization can be very empowering because it can create a sense of stewardship--a desire to use one's powers for "good". It's what's motivated me to look at Negro League data, and more recently data from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the women's league that played from 1943 to 1954 and was the first major women's sports league in the country, nearly 30 years before Title IX expanded women's participation in sports and 40 years before the WNBA.

I've been very active with this over the last few months and will have more to share later in the summer. I'm giving a poster presentation on visualizing baseball data at SABR's annual conference later in August, and am working on some other things that I will hopefully have news about.

Most recently, I've become interested in the AAGPBL, for a number of reasons. There's an important place right now for elevating the experiences of women in all areas of our society, including sports. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, for women to have played a traditionally male sport like baseball, given the tightly held gender roles that were in place at the time, their stories are very important to tell. 

Earlier this spring, some of my Twitter contacts recommended W.C. Madden's AAGPBL record book last published in 2008, but despite my efforts to find an online database to pull data from, I quickly found that I had to make my own. So one of my projects, which took most of the month of May, was to digitize the data in the record book, clean the data, and prepare it to work with in Tableau Public.

Ryan Woodward has created Women In Baseball Week to promote the achievements of women in the sport and encourage greater participation. The effort has been ongoing for several years but resonates especially strongly this year, with the 50th anniversary of Title IX and a reboot of "A League Of Their Own" coming to Amazon Prime. For my contribution, I posted a virtual card of an AAGPBL player every day for seven days. You can see the whole set here.

Joanne Weaver's virtual baseball card

The more baseball data that I visualize, and the more that I share it with people interested in baseball and in data visualization, the more I appreciate the huge opportunity that there is to use simple, clear visuals to tell stories. Please comment below with what you think about these visuals--and what else you would like to see.