387. Gapminder and dynamical visualization

Nowadays, in statistical analysis of various economic or social factors we mostly use plots where time is just another coordinate along another axis. In real life we do feel time and dynamics of various processes in a different fashion – time is more like a sequence/collection of snapshots taken at its different moments, in the same sense as a movie being a sequence of frames.

What if we express time in our diagrams in the same way we feel it in the real life – as a sequence of frames in a movie? This way, we would effectively make our two-dimensional plots three-dimensional. How commonly used are actually dynamical visualizations of data in contemporary statistical analysis?

Well, as it turns out, dynamical visualizations are the very cutting edge of presentation technology today. For example, in 2006 statistics guru Hans Rosling has made his famous TED presentation “Debunking myths about the third world” featuring dynamical visualizations of statistical data – if you never saw this video, it is definitely worth checking out – indeed, “you’ve never seen data presented like this”, as he says.

The visualization technology developed and used by Rosling in his TED talk has impressed Google’s bosses so much that the Rosling’s site it was bought by Google in March 2007 to be included into Google Spreadsheets in March 2008 as a standard functionality for data visualization (check out Motion Chart in Google Docs).

To see how good and useful dynamical diagrams can be, you may want to leave NEQNET for the GapMinder website. One of the most interesting diagrams there is “Family size vs. Length of life”, definitely worth watching a couple of times…

Or you may want to stay… Here is another demonstration of dynamical visualization’s power by Sergey Schegloff. What you see on the diagram below is the relation between price and stock’s trading volume for the companies included into Dow Jones Industrial (don’t forget to switch to the log scale!). The latter is a nice illustration of the old brokers’ lore “A rising tide lifts all the boats” (well, actually the very statement goes back to J.F. Kennedy, I believe ): prices of different stocks grow almost homogeneously on a bull market.

Via Sergey Schegloff.

Sunday’s bonus: Really enjoyed reading the discussion (200+ comments) of venture capital income problem on avc.com – one of the most informative ones I’ve ever seen.