Telling Stories with Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 6

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Compelling
Of course, stories aren't always to keep people informed or entertained.
Sometimes they're meant to provide urgency or compel people to action.
Who can forget that point in An Inconvenient Truth when Al Gore stands on
that scissor lift to show rising levels of carbon dioxide?
For my money though, no one has done this better than Hans Rosling, pro-
fessor of International Health and director of the Gapminder Foundation.
Using a tool called Trendalyzer, as shown in Figure 1-4, Rosling runs an
animation that shows changes in poverty by country. He does this during
a talk that first draws you in deep to the data and by the end, everyone is
on their feet applauding. It's an amazing talk, so if you haven't seen it yet, I
highly recommend it.
The visualization itself is fairly basic. It's a motion chart. Bubbles repre-
sent countries and move based on the corresponding country's poverty
during a given year. Why is the talk so popular then? Because Rosling
speaks with conviction and excitement. He tells a story. How often have
you seen a presentation with charts and graphs that put everyone to
sleep? Instead Rosling gets the meaning of the data and uses that to his
advantage. Plus, the sword-swallowing at the end of his talk drives the
point home. After I saw Rosling's talk, I wanted to get my hands on that
data and take a look myself. It was a story I wanted to explore, too.