Gapminder.org a great resource for students and professors at our campus, and it’s free to the public, so no subscriptions for us to pay and no logins for you to remember!
In a nutshell, Gapminder is: “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.”
They take publicly available data (like data from the UN) and try to present the statistics in creative and visually interesting graphs. Their first chart, Gapminder World, plots Life Expectancy at Birth against Income per Person and is broken down by country, the size of each country’s circle being relative to population. Then, they add time to it. You can play the graph and watch the trajectories of the countries, you can even pick out specific countries to watch.
They have many more graphs like this and, perhaps most importantly, they are sharing this graph technology with Google. If you use Google spreadsheets you’ll be able to make a motion graph based on your own data, which could look quite impressive in a presentation.
Check it out: http://www.gapminder.org/
