After professor posted the video link of visualizations created by Hans Rosling, I saw the video. It indeed was a very different way to show visualizations and present data. To me, it seemed more like a movie with changing visualizations that made sense, were easy to understand and portrayed what they were supposed to show clearly.
I went ahead and searched for some of his interactive visualizations – Gapminder.com . I just concentrated on the visualization for Life expectancy over years (although there is so much more data that can be added and information that can be viewed). Here are some of the things that I really liked –
- Use of bubble charts – In this week, we had discussions about using the right idioms to represent data. While a bar chart seems right to me about almost everything, I liked how bubble chart was used in this visualization and conveyed the meaning of the data.
- No Trend lines – The first thing that comes to my mind when I have to represent data over time, are trend lines. Using bubbles to change sizes and show trends (move up or down to show increase or decrease) across years to represent data was very innovative and interesting for me.
- Interactive Visualization – This visualization can be customized and interacted with in so many different ways. It gives you a chart to show data over the years. You can filter it and view data, compare data across countries, regions etc. It adapts quickly when a selection is made and transitions quickly.
- Just Enough – You can interact with individual piece of data and even though there is so much information in this visualization, it is not overwhelming. They have displayed and organized it appropriately.
- The video feature is super cool! Definitely check this out!
Thank you for bringing this up. It was indeed a captivating video which showcased a usually boring topic – stats on health and birth rates in an interactive manner and told a clear and compelling story. The bubble charts that he used for this ted talk later on was set as a gold standard for communicating with numbers. Almost every data scientist wanted to visualize their data set with a bubble chart and watch it dance. As I was watching the video I realized I was processing information from close to five dimensions and yet it all made sense in the end.
That’s exactly how I felt. I was able to understand all the different aspects without getting confused or getting overloaded with information (even though there was a LOT going on!).