charte.ca as an educational resource: motion charts visualizing World Bank data

High school students extract data from the World Bank dataset and create a motion chart that shows the relationship between life expectancy and expenditure on health in different countries. See discussion in Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List:

https://edulists.com.au/pipermail/yr11it/2017-August/003375.html

A set of instructions for Yr11 Information Technology students:

http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/yr11it/attachments/20170820/71ebeb96/VisualisingBigDatausingCharte-steps-0001.docx

Visualizing Google analytics report: motion chart with drilldowns

Below is a motion chart with drilldowns visualizing Google Analytics report for a fictional website. Click and hold on any bubble to see acquisition and conversion details for a specific channel: Direct, Organic Search, Referral, Social.

Why motion charts?

Motion chart allows efficient and interactive exploration and visualization of multi-dimensional data and can make it easier to notice an important trend. Google has done a great job explaining how motion chart can be useful in web analytics and providing a tool for building motion charts based on analytics reports.

Log scale for XY charts

From now on, charte.ca supports log scale in all XY charts (bubble, scatter, motion). Consider the following visualization of World Bank and SIPRI Military Expenditure Database data:

Why log scale? There are a few cases when a log scale is appropriate. The most well known is: log scales allow a large range to be displayed without small values being compressed down into bottom of the graph. Consider the same visualization made using linear scale (this is just a screenshot, not an interactive chart, but it gives you a good idea about the problem):

More fun with motion charts: European top 20 imports and exports, 1990-2016

World Bank Group provides a lot of data to play with. Let's build a motion chart based on export, import, and GDP data for European top 20 economies, grouped by regions - Northern, Western, Eastern, and Southern.

Watch international trade shrinking between 2008 and 2009!

Motion charts: add categories and animate those bubbles

charte.ca now supports motion charts. Motion charts are basically bubble charts with one more dimension added (usually, it's time). In charte.ca, we use category for this dimension, remember category radio buttons in charte.ca pie charts and bar charts? So, our motion charts are bubble charts with category radio buttons.

Recently, Statistics Canada published a quick overview of interprovincial migration data, using simple line charts. Let's make this data look fancier:

Here are the steps to create this motion chart.