There is a rising trend of using infographics and video technology to explain very significant statistics–statistics that were often isolated to only minor appearances in public service announcements and discussions within academia. But with the rise of new media formats and data visualization technology, these statistics have the opportunity to appeal to the general audience and inform them about some very important data that explain some very important issues.
In this video, Hans Rosling explains the connection between life expectancy and income through 200 years in 200 countries using 120,000 numbers in just 4 minutes. Hans shows how the world we live in changed radically over 200 years and how this world is very different then the world most of us imagine. From the data visualizations, we see the huge disparities in income and health between countries and even within countries, as Hans demonstrates within the different provinces of China.
This video is part of a new series from BBC called, “The Joy of Stats”.
This documentary will explore various forms of data gathering and statistical analysis, such as a new application that mashes police department data with the city’s street map to show what crime is being reported street by street, house by house, in near real-time; and Google’s current efforts at the machine translation project.
It is exciting to see this new surge in data visualizations and the opportunity to explain the world that we all live in.