This visualisation is my attempt at a homage on a very famous data visualisation:
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 years, 4 minutes.
It was probably my first exposure into visualisation, during a very mundane training workshop at work, it was probably the highlight of the day now that I think of it. I think one of the key things in the visualisation here was the interactive aspect of it. If you were just thrown a bunch of charts and numbers, it wouldn't have stuck. Instead when you hit play, you see the changes the countries go through. You see populations rising, countries growing more affluent, you see life expectancy growing and also the speed at which some nations grow.
Not only that, Hans does a great job with his storytelling, I really recommend watching it
The visualisation was made with Tableau Public, and the underlying data was source from Worldbank:
Some data preparation was necessary, the most immediate issue being the format data was recorded in the csv files obtained from Worldbank. In order to display the scatterplots and create a year by year animation, Tableau needs to read the data such that each line (row). This can be easily solved by using the pivot function in Tableau, or with a simple bit of coding. I'm sharing a snippet of the python code I used.
The next other issue I had was checking that data, which included summary level data (eg. on the world level, or high income countries and the like), these needed to be excluded. I also opted to adopt the UN Geoscheme classification for regions instead.
Tableau Public also limits the visualisation speed, this is something I wanted to change badly since it feels lacklustre when moving so slowly. It would have been much better if I could show this at the speeds on my desktop instead.