Ryan sent me a link to World Development Indicators – Google Public Data Explorer. This is a great visual data explorer with lots of data already available. It looks like the Gapminder Trendanalyzer, which Google bought in 2007. (Gapminder is now focused on keeping statistical data up-to-date and producing related media.) In Google Public Data you can search for datasets and then play with the type of visualization and so on. I’m struck by how this model of weaving datasets and tools together works so simply with the tools adapting to the datasets. I wonder if we could do something like this for texts?
Gapminder’s Hans Rosling has a TED talk on Stats that reshape your worldview that is worth watching where he talks about preconceptions we have about the world. He is really good at showing how much things have changed so that preconceptions true in the 1960s are not longer valid.
As Megan Garber explains in Dataviz, democratized: Google opens Public Data Explorer, one of the things Google has done is to now allow us to upload our data too, so this ceases to be such a passive interpretation tool. The trick is the Dataset Publishing Language that lets uploaders describe their data so the Public Data Explorer can present it properly.