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3 October 2007

Another cool visualization site

Zachary Johnson sent along a link to his new comparative politics data visualization website, the World Freedom Atlas. This is how he describes the site:

The World Freedom Atlas is a geovisualization tool for world statistics. It was designed for social scientists, journalists, NGO/IGO workers, and others who wish to have a better understanding of issues of freedom, democracy, human rights, and good governance. It covers the years 1990 to 2006.

When I took a look around, I was impressed. The site allows you to pick variables, compare variables from different years (which makes it easy to compare, say, polity scores in 1995 with the level of corruption 5 years later), produce interactive scatterplots and boxplots, etc. The data is taken from existing published sources, some of it good and some of it less so (I have a particular beef with the Vanhanen "Index of Democratization", which has always struck me as possibly the silliest attempt to measure a concept yet produced in the comparative politics literature). A couple of suggestions to incorporate in the next version: When you brush a point in the scatterplot, it only brings up the name of one country. Given the lumpiness of the data, this often conceals several other country names. Also, it would be nice to incorporate a function that allows you to print out nice image files of particular map/scatterplots/etc. I don't know how hard that would be to do. All in all, it's worth a look.

Posted by Mike Kellermann at October 3, 2007 11:10 AM