Great Visualizations
May 16th, 2008 cpetersen
Visualizing complex data can be hard. How do you get your point across when the data you have to present doesn't fit nicely into a bar chart, pie chart, line graph or histogram?
Over the last couple of weeks, I've come across a number of great visualizations. They cover a range of topics, but they all effectively convey complex data in a very accessible way. Edward Tufte would be proud.
Water Distribution
This is a great visualization, it shows where water is located on earth. It could have been displayed in a bar chart, however, it would have effectively gone to zero by the time you got to fresh water. This method effectively conveys relative distribution down to rivers and plants and animals.
Early Adopters
The following graphic shows us the price of a piece of technology relative to its market penetration over time. As if three variables wasn't enough, it shows all that for 6 separate pieces of technology relative to each other.
Global GDPs
The final visualization shows the GDP of the world's four largest economies after the United States, relative to the US. There are a lot of unanswered questions about this visualization, like is the US economy exactly as big as these four combined? The visualization implies so, but I don't know for sure. Additionally, are the economies distributed on a dollar = geographic size only, or does it imply that the UK has the same GDP as the Southeast United States? Again, I assume the former, but the latter is a possibility. At any rate, the graphic is very effective at conveying the relative size of the worlds top five economies.
Leave a Reply