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Home / Business & Management / Data Analytics / Data to Insight: An Introduction to Data Analysis and Visualisation / Data visualisation

Data visualisation

Hans Rosling takes you on a four minute journey to represent 200 years of global economic shift.
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3.8
Visualization is right at the heart of my own work too. I teach global health. And I know, having the data is not enough. I have to show it in ways people both enjoy, and understand.
17.9
Now, I’m going to try something I’ve never done before: animating the data in real space, with a bit of technical assistance from the crew.
29.3
So, here we go: first an axis for health. Life expectancy from 25 years to 75 years.
38.6
And down here, an axis for wealth:
41.2
Income per person: 400, 4,000, and 40,000 dollars. So down here, is poor and sick, and up here is rich and healthy. Now I’m going to show you the world 200 years ago, in 1810.
60.3
Here come all the countries: Europe brown, Asia red, Middle East green, Africa South of the Sahara blue, and the Americas yellow. And the size of the country bubble shows the size of the population. And in 1810, it was pretty crowded down there, wasn’t it? All countries were sick and poor, life expectancy was below 40 in all countries and only the UK and the Netherlands were slightly better off, but not much. And now, I start the world.
92
The industrial revolution makes countries in Europe and elsewhere move away from the rest, but the colonized countries in Asia and Africa, they are stuck down there. And eventually, the Western countries get healthier and healthier. And now, we slow down to show the impact of the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic. What a catastrophe! And now I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s. And, in spite of the Great Depression, western countries forge on towards greater wealth and health. Japan and some others try to follow but most countries stay down here. Now, after the tragedies of the Second World War, we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948.
138.5
1948 was a great year: the war was over, Sweden topped the medal table at the Winter Olympics, and I was born. But the differences between the countries of the world was wider than ever. The United States was in the front, Japan was catching up, Brazil was way behind, Iran was getting a little richer from oil but still had short lives.
162.7
And the Asian giants: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, they were still poor and sick down here, but look what is about to happen! Here we go again! In my lifetime, former colonies gained independence, and then finally they started to get healthier, and healthier, and healthier. And in the 1970s, then countries in Asia and Latin America
186.1
started to catch up with the Western countries: they became the emerging economies. Some in Africa follow, some Africans were stuck in civil wars, others hit by HIV. And now we can see the world today, in the most up-to-date statistics. Most people today live in the middle. But there are huge differences at the same time between the better off countries and the worse off countries and there are also huge inequalities within countries. These bubbles show country averages, but I can split them. Take China, I can split it into provinces. There goes Shanghai. It has the same wealth and health as Italy today.
227.7
And there is the poor inland province Guizhou, it’s like Pakistan and if I split it further the rural parts are like Ghana in Africa.
241.1
And yet, despite the enormous disparities today, we have seen 200 years of remarkable progress. That huge historical gap between the West and the Rest is now closing. We have become an entirely new converging world, and I see a clear trend into the future, with aid, trade, green technology, and peace. It’s fully possible that everyone can make it to the healthy-wealthy corner.
267.7
Well, what you’ve just seen in the last few minutes is the story of 200 countries shown over 200 hundred years and beyond. It involved plotting 120,000 numbers. Pretty neat, eh?

Just in case you are wondering where we are heading with this course, we encourage you to watch this Hans Rosling video. There is more information about this video and the Gapminder Foundation at “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes”.

Until his recent death (7 February 2017), Hans Rosling was the principal behind the Gapminder Foundation and the Gapminder data we often use. He was a major force in the fields of data visualisation, and global heath and development, and was the world’s best communicator of data-based stories for a general audience.

In 4 short minutes Hans Rosling conveys the power of visualisation in the process of telling a compelling story about global health. You’ll see how the visualisations uncover the story, and how they help communicate the story.

This short clip is from the longer film The Joy of Stats – © Wingspan Productions for BBC, 2010 – broadcasted on 16th October 2013 on BBC Four. Director and Producer: Dan Hillman; Executive Producer: Archie Baron. Permission to use the video for this course was granted by the Gapminder Foundation (which is still going strong and producing amazing things).

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Data to Insight: An Introduction to Data Analysis and Visualisation

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Postscripts

The Gapminder Foundation, now led by Hans’ son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, is still going strong and still doing amazing things.

The full The Joy of Stats video is here and here.

But my favorite Hans Rossling videos are still his earliest TED talks which were such a revelation when they first appeared, “The best stats you’ve ever seen” (2006) and “New insights on poverty” (2007) – at the end of which he pulled his ultimate party trick (but I won’t spoil it by sharing)

Want to keep learning?

This content is taken from The University of Auckland online course
Data to Insight: An Introduction to Data Analysis and Visualisation
View Course
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