So, somewhat in response to OW’s post, I give you Gapminder. It produces really amazing graphs. Seriously. Click on “explore the world.” And then explore. I think it’s super cool (WOW is it cool). I saw this by watching a video by its founder, Hans Rosling, present at TED. Laying aside what I think of his accounts of poverty, I say to you, this is the future of presenting graphs! Google bought Gapminder. You can upload data to it. Check it out! Warning: you may waste lots of time here. But it’s time worth wasting.
-
Pages
-
Categories
- asa meetings
- ask a scatterbrain
- books
- Canada
- contest
- cryptic
- dialogues
- disarray
- dork
- economics
- family
- fun
- gender
- health
- help wanted
- inequality
- internet
- kids
- LGBT
- meta
- misadventures
- music
- online wonders
- personal
- politics
- procrastination
- professional
- race
- religion
- science
- sexualities
- sports
- students
- teaching
- too much information
- travel
- Uncategorized
- what does this have to do w/ org theory?
- work and family
- writing
-
Archives
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
5 Comments
Ah, you bring back good memories. One of my first blog posts was on Gapminder…I still remember how Eszter linked to it from Crooked Timber to introduce my blog…And I was just thinking of resurrecting the ol’ site, too…
As for Gapminder, I haven’t done much with it since Fall 2006, but back then I found it somewhat difficult to use my own data. Maybe it has improved since then?
Jim,
The standalone version of Gapminder was beta software a couple of years ago but they yanked it from the net when Google took over. Much of the functionality is available in Google apps via the motion chart widget.
Hopefully they will develop a full featured standalone version one day. The current widget has key limitations. For example, I don’t think there is currently an easy way to incorporate a motion chart widget into a powerpoint presentation.
Meanwhile, another great data visualization program to check out is Tableau. It has a very intuitive interface and can easily produce graphs much more attractive than standard Excel/Stata output. One of the Tableau founders is from Pixar. I think another got a PhD studying artificial intelligence. If you could combine the Tableau interface/graphics functionality with a good statistics program, you would have a very nice piece of software.
I’ve incorporated Gapminder animations into my PowerPoint slides by taking a video screenshot of the animation and putting that video file on a slide. It’s worked well.
Thanks for the pointing out Tableau, Conrad. I’ll check it out.
Google bought Gapminder? Cool. Now maybe Google Docs and Spreadsheets will be even more useful.