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Gapminder is blowing my mind

Dec 3rd, 2009
by pollyalida.
3 comments

Gapminder shows statistics in motion. Doesn’t sound too exciting? Take a look at this amazing tool and see if you don’t agree. Ok, I’m a data geek – but this will help you find your own inner data geek, I promise.

This chart shows declining birth rate associated with increases in personal income for the US, UK, China & India. What story can you tell about what’s happening here?

Just think how this could be used in school to bring “boring” old data to life. This service has been around for a few years, but I just learned about it thanks to Buffy Hamilton’s post:  Storytelling with Data: Statistics Tell a Story.

Gapminder includes over 200 social and economic indicators that you can use to create amazing data representations. Countries of the world are represented by bubbles on the charts. Regions of the world are shown by color and bubble size shows relative population size.

And take a look at this stellar presentation by one of the founders of Gapminder, Hans Rosling as he makes data not only compelling, but entertaining!

About 10 years ago I worked on a project called “Numbers Tell the Story” that helped libraries create compelling stories about their libraries that were supported by data. Part of the technology piece of the project was learning to use Excel & Powerpoint to transform data into visually interesting charts and images rather than boring tables of data. I’m just imagining what a Gapminder like tool could have done for that project.

Google Fusion Tables

Nov 11th, 2009
by pollyalida.
1 comment

I discovered Google’s Fusion Tables tool while preparing for a workshop on Google Tools for Reference Staff at the CT Library Consortium’s Reference Roundtable meeting last week. I’m still exploring all the features!

Fusion Tables is a Google Labs project that lets you work with sets of data uploaded from Google Docs spreadsheets or other .xls files. It lets you create charts, graphs and maps to visualize your data, filter data to focus on subsets of your data and even merge it with other publicly available data tables to create new data sets.

One very handy visualization is the Intensity Map. This is based on geography and your table must have a column with some geogaphic information – states, countries, etc. For example a table with state population data from the census can be turned into this sort of data map:

The Filter feature lets you find data in your tables based on certain conditions and create new visualizations in a flash. For example, this map of states with population over 10 million.

If you make your data public, you can embed visualizations on other web pages.

The aggregate feature opens up all sorts of possibilities for sharing data sets. This feature lets you can pull in columns of data from data tables that others have shared.

Are you using this tool? Or do you have ideas for how it could be used? I’d love to see examples of what others are doing with it.

It’s NOT a search engine – Wolfram Alpha – try it!

May 22nd, 2009
by pollyalida.
2 comments

A new tool for finding data and doing calculations was released in March. I just heard about it today – several times in fact – I’m a few weeks behind on the “buzz”.

Wolfram Alpha is NOT a search engine – “It’s a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.” (source)

What does that mean? If you’re looking for data or something that can be computed, Wolfram Alpha will try to figure it out and give you an answer. It’s not searching the web and returning web pages that might have an answer. It’s drawing on a big collection of data to try and get the right information for you.

It can be a bit fussy about what you put in, so do take a look at their page of examples to get a feel for what it can do.

A couple of searches I tested:

And my all time favorite that was used in an NPR piece on Wolfram Alpha

Try it out. What do you think? Did you find some great searches to share?