Looking at the graphs, we were straight away able to tell that decreasing records have to do with track events and increasing have to do with field events. Also, it can be told that from the Y axis that there are huge differences between the records. This could mean that the events are a mix of both track and field.
Since we did not know the scale, we had guess all the possible events and possible units for the vertical axis.
There were also obvious anomalies on the graphs. There could have been several contributing factors to these anomalies. For example, a few graphs had points that were both ascending and descending. This may have been caused as the scoring system may have changed. Furthermore, this may have happened because of equipment change such as the javelin event. Also, the Olympics was stopped during World War 2 and certain things may have been altered. Huge gaps in the records may have been a result of drugs as there was no drug testing during that period.It was also likely that men events had set higher records.
We noticed that some of them had similar numbers on the vertical axis. From this we were able to deduce that the events from the two graphs were probably related. Women events could be told because they were started later than men events.
There was one particular graph were the scoring was up to 9000. This was an extremely high number an unlikely to be quite common so it was explained to be the Decathlon event. For the Decathlon event, athletes were scored by the relative quality of their performance, not against each other. Through the point system, this provided all the events with equal nominal value, thus making it fair.
There were some vertical axis's with decimal places and colons. The colon ones, on graph 3 and 8, were worked out to be time easily-running events. The ones with decimal places needed to be accurate, hence the decimals, so it was likely to be a field event such as jumping or throwing.
Finally, we looked at the numbers and the realistic numbers that records may have. In the end, we managed to figure out which event belonged to which graph.
Graph 1: Men’s 100m
Graph 2: Men’s Long Jump
Graph 3: Women’s 1500m
Graph 4: Men’s High Jump
Graph 5: Men’s Javelin
Graph 6: Women’s High Jump
Graph 7: Men’s Decathlon
Graph 8: Women’s 10000m
Graph 9: Men’s 4x100m Relay
Graph 10: Women’s 100m
Assisted by: Denise Lai, Emily Guess, Benjamin Phang