Practical Application of a Data Visualization Software

6/6/2015

Practical Application of a Data Visualization Software

In this post, I bring you data visualization examples which I created for an article focused on international politics published by Forbes . I developed graphs using a data analytics software Tableau which comes with powerful visualization tools. The goal of the article was to draw a distinction between the European Union (EU) and Russia led Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) in terms of economic might, level of corruption and government effectiveness, and overall freedom. The following chart shows a series of rank ordered bars corresponding to the countries comprising the EU and the ECU in terms of economic freedom. This data visualization not only shows comparative freedom of each country, but also highlights categories where each country falls. The data source is the Index of Economic Freedom by Heritage Foundation.

The next chart represents a dual axes scatterplot with countries plotted based on the level of corruption and government effectiveness. The source for this data is Worldwide Governance Indicators by the World Bank.

The final chart is yet another example of how visualization tools provide means to plot complex information on a single viz. This graph is divided in three parts: countries, freedom status and ranking of political and civil liberties for each country. The last part is interesting as it includes several categories which had to be added to this data visualization piece without overwhelming it. I achieved this by using an array of micro pie charts. The data for this data viz came from Freedom in the World Report by Freedom House.

data visualization international politics

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Visualize Data on the United States Trade Deficit

6/1/2015

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Visualize Data on the United States Trade Deficit

The United States, the world’s largest economy, has been running a trade deficit. The value of its overall imports surpasses exports. BrightPoint among its several innovative data visualization examples presents this dynamic temporal chart which creatively highlights this imbalance. On this interactive visualization tool readers can see how the trade is broken down by imports vs exports as well as the figures on the trade balance by country. America’s imports are colored light red and exports in light green. This neat data visualization consists of a number of charts corresponding to individual month’s trade deficit figures stretching from 2001 through 2013.

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Visual Data Analytics of the US Consumerism

5/30/2015

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Visual Data Analytics of the US Consumerism

Bloomberg View provides this interactive US consumer spending data analytics visualization named How We Spend. This data visualization tool shows how Americans have been spending since late 1960’s through 2010. The author, Matthew C. Klein, uses a combination of trend lines, stacked bar charts and succinct interpretative captions to narrate the story. On the opening screen, it is interesting to see how the spending behavior of Americans has been fluctuating over the years. It is easy to recognize the economic downturn of 2008 as a dip on the graph.

Readers can interact with these series of data visualizations by hovering a cursor over individual data points corresponding to various years to unveil exact percentages. On certain pages users can highlight a category from a group as shown on the picture below. On the screen dedicated to the composition of retail sales growth, food services and drinking places retail category is highlighted. Moving a cursor to a data point shows respective percentages.

Interestingly, despite the rise in internet users over recent years and rapid expansion of e-commerce, online sales have only been accountable for about 10 percent of nondurable goods in 2013.

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