About the project

“Carrying the flame” started as a story and graphic package idea for BSU at The Games, a Ball State immersive learning class focused on sending a team of student journalists to the Olympics and the Chicago Tribune to report on the Games. Students produced stories, photos, videos and graphics that were published in newspapers across the United States. My idea to do some sort of visualization about the torch relay ended up evolving into my senior capstone project and something larger than I initially imagined.

In May 2016, I started looking around to see what other journalists had done on the torch relay from a data perspective. I didn’t find much, surprisingly. I couldn’t find any datasets on every single relay. What followed was a marathon session to hack together and clean a comprehensive dataset based on Olympic Studies Centre reference documents about the relay, with the goal of creating a story and data visualization package for BSU at the Games that would look at the Olympic torch relay from a data perspective. I would eventually use the question “What can data tell us about the relay?” as a springboard for the content on this website.

Along the way, finding data on the relay became an obsession, where I took deeper and deeper dives into the history of the relay and its Nazi origins, discovering how little it’s mentioned in the broader context of the Games. When considering the history of the relay, it’s transformed into a completely different entity from when it was first founded.

During each iteration of the relay, a handful of news organizations will post a piece about the relay’s history. It’s understandable why journalists might not cover the relay’s past and future in greater detail given the inaccessibility of relay documents, which the LA84 Foundation is changing with their digital library collection.

The inaccessibility of records and data motivated me to transform my story idea into a project that seeks to fill in the gaps of Olympic coverage while providing interesting looks into the relay through data and records.

Everything on this site is open source and the data is available for download on Github. If you use the data, let me know! I’d love to see what you come up with.

Interested in reading more about my methodology? Check out the documentation.

Credit for the final product also goes to the project adviser, Renee Human, and Tyson Bird and Stacie Kammerling their design, illustration and coding skills.