The Beautiful Data

Written by glenn mcdonald Monday, 18 July 2011 15:54

Homare Sawa made her Women's World Cup Finals debut in 1995 at age 16, in Japan's group opener against Germany. Japan lost the game, 1-0. She played again two days later as Japan beat Brazil 2-1, and again two days after that, but Sweden beat Japan 2-0 in their third game and they were eliminated.

Sawa made her second Cup appearance in 1999, as Japan drew 1-1 with Canada in their opener, but were beat 5-0 by Russia and 4-0 by Norway, and eliminated.

In her third appearance, in 2003, Sawa had two goals in Japan's 6-0 opening rout of Argentina, but they were beaten again by Germany, 3-0, and her goal against Canada in the third game was the 1 in a 3-1 loss. Japan were eliminated.

In 2007, Sawa and Japan drew 2-2 with England in their opener, and beat Argentina again, but lost to Germany for a third time, and were again eliminated.

In 2011, as Japan's captain, Homare Sawa became one of only 4 women (and 2 men) to appear in 5 different Cups. Japan beat New Zealand 2-1 in their opener, and Sawa had a hat-trick in a 4-0 victory against Mexico in the second game. This was enough for Japan to advance out of group play for the first time, but a 2-0 loss to England in the third game consigned them to face #2-ranked Germany yet again in the quarterfinals.

In what some called the then-biggest upset in Women's World Cup history, Japan finally beat Germany, 1-0. Sawa then scored the game-winning second goal of Japan's 3-1 semi-final victory over Sweden, and the game-tying goal in the 27th minute of extra time to send the final against the #1-ranked US into penalty kicks, where they won after four shooters. The official match statistics do not record who would have taken the fifth Japanese penalty kick, but let's stipulate it would have been Sawa. She finished the tournament with the Golden Ball for MVP, the Golden Boot for most goals, and the Cup itself, to cap an 18-year national-team career.

This is just one story in the history of the Women's World Cup. Here it is retold in statistics. And here, to go with it, is a statistical hyperindex of all of Women's World Cup History, with many, many other stories. This parallels the statistical hyperindex of all of Men's World Cup History we did for the men's World Cup last summer. The stories aren't all the same, but the data-structures are, and it took us only a few minutes of data-import and a couple hours of curation to turn one database into the other.

The stories in other data may be very different. But the essential properties of data do not change, and the paths of human inquiry through data follow common patterns across all topics. This is what we are trying to improve in Needle. We are trying to build a kind of database in which you can find the stories in your data.