Oops, there may be something wrong with my data…. People are living a very long time in Russia!
Mortality Rates, Male
Data Collection
I now have all my data, and I have an awful lot of it. This isn’t even everything I’ve got:
I’ve gathered nearly of my recent data from the World Bank website, it allows the option to download very specific pieces of data, and that function will save me a considerable amount of time. The data is already pretty clean too, which really helps. Now all I need to do is decide which data best expresses what I want to express, or see what patterns emerge.
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?Report_Name=Freshwater-usage&Id=f0dd3498#
Maps, Maps, More Maps
Using Tableau Public, I have created some visually interesting maps showing commercial water usage worldwide, links here; https://public.tableau.com/views/Industry_19/Sheet1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes
I’m sure water usage, especially excessive freshwater usage for economic reasons is contributing to environmental degradation, and I have included research in my thesis relating to this, link here; https://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/18/1027/2014/
More Maps
So it seems creating maps with the World Bank data viz tool is easy, and I really like the tool. It doesn’t mess about, and unlike many tools I have used, (Datawrapper, Tableau Public, Open Heat Maps, and more) it seems to be quite intuitive.
The maps are lovely, but it just will not let me properly download them, and only seems to allow saving within the website, which is really frustrating.
If I could download or embed these maps, then I would absolutely use this tool and all the data from this website for my final piece, because they are some of the most visually attractive I have come across. Combine that with the ease of creation and lack of need for the laborious and somewhat soul-destroying task of data cleaning, then this tool would win hands down.
Nothing is ever easy in the world of data viz. Who said robots were set to take over the world? Not yet, not yet…..
Beautiful Maps
I’ve already managed to create some beautiful data visualisations as maps using the World Bank website and data viz tool. unfortunately, the site is not letting me create an account so that I can download and save these maps. I will have to keep trying. Based on experience with data viz from a previous project, creating maps this easily is not necessarily the norm, so I will stick with this tool and these data sets, as they are already “clean” and compatible with each other.
World Bank Data
After spending some time on the World Bank website, it demonstrates a good range of data in relevant areas for this project, and also has a tool for creating data visualisations using the data provided. It has a relatively simple interface, but does not seem to be intelligent enough to suggest specifics for creating more readable data visualisations.
I will play around with this tool and see if I can create some usable data visualisations for the final piece of data journalism.
I have noticed that you can select as many variables as you like, which isn’t ideal, as it then creates unreadable or confusing data visualisations. Above all I want my data visualisations to be easily readable, or they fail at the most basic level.
