Eurovision 2019: Making your points

And now the points from…

I wasn’t even planning on another post about the Eurovision Song Contest and the voting geography of this crazy contest. However, messing around on data and geospatial visualisation platforms, and the urge became too strong. So twelve months on here I am again, examining the predictability of voting patterns. The Balkans bloc, the Scandinavian bloc, the former Soviet bloc – you know the drill, so I’ll spare going through the context again – I’ve explored this previously in 2018 and 2017. 

Data viz for the Euroviz

What’s new for this year are interactive data visualisations where you can explore a country’s track record of voting, via maps and Sankey diagrams below. For example, when the voting begins, “and now for the votes from Oslo” you can go to the map below and select Norway’s voting histories – both total points and % possible given. Exploring this example, you can see Sweden and Denmark can almost guarantee points from Norway.

Another tool we have is the Sankey relationship diagram to explore points exchanged historically between ESC 2019 voting countries and those in the Eurovision 2019 Grand Final. Click and hover to explore a breakdown of these relationships. For example, The Netherlands are one of the bookies favourites for the competition – selecting The Netherlands on the right, we can see that Belgium and Germany have a strong track record of voting, but will need to widen their voting pattern to secure victory.

Additionally, at the other end of the scale, as British person, we just hope we can get any points – I’ll be using this tool to see where Britain is more likely to possibly scrape points from. Conversely, if we click the left hand side on Cyprus, one can see they give most of their points to Greece, 419 points to date.

Enjoy the contest and happy mapping,

David