Gapminder Makes Statistics Gorgeous

I’m a big fan of Data Visualization and I’ve often tried to ‘pitch it’ as a service to NGOs and nonprofits who usually don’t really get it. Well thankfully I now have a perfect use-case, the people at Gapminder! Gapminder is a group that takes statistical information from research, reports and other sources and turns it into spectacular visuals using software called Trendalyzer. For instance some charts show the disparities between countries by representing things like GDP and income per capita others show things like which countries have the most oil or the best teeth. Gapminder also offers a web service for users to create their own visualizations.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

The initial activity was to continue development of the Trendalyzer software. This software unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics. The current beta version of Trendalyzer is available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying a few time series of development statistics for all countries www.gapminder.org/world. In March 2006 Google acquired Trendalyzer from Gapminder Foundation and the team of developers that worked for Gapminder has joined Google in California since April 2007.

Since the Trendalyzer development was taken over by Google the Gapminder Foundation maintain the same aim and uses Trendalyzer and its resources to produce videos and web service showing major global development trends with animated statistics. Such a 3 to10 minute video is called a GapCast and they are published as free web casts with the aim of promoting a fact based world view. A GapCast converts statistical time series into moving graphics in ways that allows evidence based trends to be told as simple story lines. The time series used will be made freely available in the web service called Gapminder World that enable end users to further explore the underlying statistics in Trendalyzer graphics.

Group co-founder Hans Rosling presented at TED 2006.