New Media and Visualizing History
From time to time I stumble across something that I find really interesting or useful on the web. More than a year ago, I commented on how the web was teaching us new ways of visualizing/studying history in two blog entries about the baby name wizard and another collection of online tools.
Well, the other day I stumbled on another set of tools including a tool that animates the change in life expectancy vs. per capita income for individual nations over time. When you follow the link, the tool will automatically play through to 2004, but you can use the timeline bar at the bottom of the page to move forward and backward through time. You can also speed it up or slow it down, change the scales of the points, and highlight specific countries using the check boxes on the right. The points are color coded by region. Two interesting things shown by this chart are that the US always falls on the right-hand side of the curve (showing we get less added life expectancy per dollar--Michael Moore would be proud), and that all the dark blue dots (Africa) are at the bottom of the curve while every other region seems to display a range matching the overall curve, more or less. It's also sad to see some of the dots going backwards in specific years (check out Rwanda). If you want an explanation of the chart, here's a link to a video. The Chart is made by a group called Gapminder and they have other interesting tools here and here. What do you think?
I forgot to point out, just for accuracy's sake, that you should notices that the scale on the income axis has been manipulated to accentuate the curve. Thus, some of the changes over time and comparative values are either more or less dramatic than they appear in the animation. So, the Russian Fed. has a per capita income $27,000 less than that of the US, but earns only $7000 more than Guinea, despite being roughly the same distance apart on the graph. This distortion masks the relative poverty of regions like South Asia, and the enormous wealth of the US, Canada, and much of Europe.