Visualizing Spatial Sports Data

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Lecturer: Kirk Goldsberry (Austin/Texas, USA)

Assistant at chair: Anil Özdemir

Syllabus

Visualizing Spatial Sports Data (PDF, 50 KB)

About the course

This seminar explores how to use data visualization and thematic cartography to elevate the analyses of sports performance. We will focus on player tracking data from the NBA throughout the seminar to help explore, discover, and communicate new findings about elite athletes.

About Kirk Goldsberry:
Kirk grew up in State College, PA in the 80’s and 90’s before attending Penn State. After graduating,he worked as a cartographer for FEMA in D.C., and for Delorme Mapping in Yarmouth, Maine. He Ieft Maine for Santa Barbara where he studied mapping as a grad student.

Kirk studied Geography at Penn State as an undergrad before getting a Master’s and a Ph.D. from UC-Santa Barbara. He was an assistant professor at Michigan State from 2007-2011 before accepting a visiting position at Harvard in 2011. His expertise in geography is in mapping and Cartography. He loves maps. In 2012 he published his first work on basketball analytics at the MIT Sloan Conference. This paper changed his career.

Following its publication, he helped create the 2012 NBA Finals Preview at the New
York Times, before accepting a part-time position at Grantland, which at the time was
just starting. He left Harvard and academics in 2013 and went to work at Grantland full-time, where he stayed until the site was shut down in 2015

 At that time, he accepted two jobs on the “team side” – 1) as the head analyst for Team USA Basketball and 2) as the Vice President of Strategic Research for the San Antonio Spurs. He still does work at Team USA, but left the Spurs in September of 2018 to return to writing and teaching.

Registration (deadline: September 10, 2021)

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Ph.D. students are given priority; advanced Master’s students are welcome to apply. Please note that you are not allowed to participate if your application has not been accepted by the chair.

Oct 11 - Oct 15, 2021

Morning sessions (10:15 - 12:00 AM)

Afternoon sessions (2:00 - 3:45 PM)

Rooms: (see course catalogue)