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World Bank Data Visualizer

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World Bank Data Visualizer
The World Bank has created a complex visualisation tool to make available 49 indicators for 209 countries and 18 aggregates from 1960-2007. Data includes social, economic, financial, information & technology, and environmental indicators. The visualisation is completely customizable bubble chart in the spirit of 'gapminder' and the user selects the x and y axis dimensions as well as the variable that determine the size of the bubbles and the time point to be displayed.
Visual types
Level of expertise
Source:
2009 World Development Indicators database: The World Bank Group, 2009 (Visualisation information web site)
http://devdata.worldbank.org/DataVisualizer/
Interactive features
User can customize all aspects of the tool, variables and countries to be displayed, colours, scales and export options.
Benefits & pitfalls to avoid
  • Using area or volume to represent data can distort data values, and exaggerate differences between values. For example, if the radius of the circle is used to represent data values, the area of the circle will quadruple if the data values double. There is also an issue of 'perceptual scaling' - the tendency of people to underestimate areas.
Create your own
  • Bubble charts can be created in a range of standard data applications such as Excel.