My finished product can be found at Cheevers_Ava_Infographic.pdf. Detailed explanations of the plots found within the inforgraphic can be found below.

Winning chances by profession scatterplot

I created this visualization out of my suspicion that different professions attract people with different types of skills or personalities that may fair better or worse at Jeopardy. Thus, I wanted to see if historic Jeopardy performance data could support this theory. When contestants are introduced on Jeopardy, it always follows the following pattern: Ava Cheevers is a data scientist from Chicago, IL. Thus, I was able to obtain profession data through my web scrape. I cleaned this data with simplification in mind, for example human rights attorney became attorney, and dermatologist became medical doctor. For the chart, I only included data from 2010-2021, and I only included professions with more than 40 unique contestants over this time period to decrease the influence of random variance on this chart. I did not include data from teachers’ or students’ tournaments.

I believe the chart contains two main insights. Firstly, it explores who performs the best/worst on average in Jeopardy (performance being defined as winning at least 1 game). I notice that science or research based professions tend to do best. Secondly, it says which professions most commonly are brought onto Jeopardy. I notice attorneys, writers, and teachers are extremely common on the show.

Winning chances by state map

I created this visualization to see if there were significant regional differences in Jeopardy success (again measured as winning 1+ game). I obtained this data from the same pattern above. Once again, I included only the last 10 years of data and states that have seen more than 40 unique contestants in this time. Once insight from this chart is that although there are clear differences by state, regional patterns are less clear. However, I think the pattern of similarity in the Northeast is interesting. Additionally, it is interesting that the South East does well, but the ring of states surrounding it does not.

The Path to Victory alluvial diagram

I made this visualization because I wanted to see the level of volatility throughout a Jeopardy game. I was interested to see if people often won after being down the whole game, or whether the early leader usually prevailed. It seems like clear winners emerge only at the end of the second board, although there are a few wins/losses made in Final Jeopardy. Prior to this point, there is a fair amount of volatility. I think this alluvial diagram presents a clear way to visualize this process.

Number of wrong buzz-ins per correct answer heatmap

I made this visualization with the suspicion that winners had more precision on certain areas of the game board, for example, perhaps only missing the hardest $1000 questions but consistenlty getting the $600s. However, this suspicion turned out to be untrue. Winners had a higher ratio of wrong answers to correct answers on many squares on the board, and a lower ratio at only one square compared to game losers. This suggests that winners may be more risk-taking or aggressive in their gameplay, and that this strategy may be rewarding.

Data Citation

This data was scraped from j-archive.com, a comprehensive fan-created archive of Jeopardy shows. See jscrape.py and cleaning.ipynb for web-scraping scripts. Datasets can be found in the data/ subfolder.