Problem
Golf Digest provides significant insight into the best courses in the United States and how they compare to one another. But the website fails to provide a map that shows where each course is located, especially in relation to each other.
Solution
I put together this interactive map for avid golfers to be able to see the top 100 courses across the country and to plan multi-course golf trips with ease.
There is nothing worse than planning a golf trip months in advance only to find out there was another top 100 course 30 minutes away that you didn't know about. Hopefully, golfers can use this map to plan their trips going forward to get the most out of golfing adventures.
Process
This data was collected by creating a web-scraping app that took the "HTLM" elements from the Golf Digest website. Once those we all collected, some cleaning needed to be done in order to create nice clean tables. Since there was nowhere to scrape the latitude and longitude of each course, I had to google each one individually. This data set only has 100 data points, so it was relatively easy to do in about 2 hours. If this data set was larger, I would have had to create a program to google locations and collect the data from that. Since it was so small, I thought it would be faster to do it manually. After all the data was collected, I used a Jupyter Notebook and CSV editor to clean the data and make everything in a nice presentable way.
Once the data was collected and cleaned, I used D3.js to create the sortable tables so that anyone could look at all the data points in an easy way. After that was done, I used Leaflet along with D3.js to create a clean map with some pop-ups to provide info about the course.
Next Steps
Mapping out data is fun and not to complicated. The next maps I would love to make see be made would to best courses in Europe. A map of the best courses in the world would also be something very cool to see. There are plenty of other possibilities to make smaller maps of courses in each state or other countries with lots of courses like Ireland or Scotland.
Course rankings by Golf Digest. Photographs by LinksGem Golf Photos.