I think a growing/shrinking bubble visualization (e.g., hans rosling style..http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html) would be great…

It’s good question. Try it and see!

Seriously, I’m not claiming this is the be-all, end-all for this data set.

Nothing ever is, really.

That said, I like the Tuftean “small multiples” idea. This is really 2 columns of a spreadsheet I made. A better version of this idea would be active, not static, and would enable sorting by country name as well as by volatility. That makes it easier to look up the trend for a particular country you’re interested in.

For comparison, I think 50 lines would be too many.

When I did the volatility sort in the spreadsheet, what really struck me was scrolling down the list and watching the sparklines a) flatten, and b) approach the reference line.

You get that same effect by scrolling down in this HTML page.

Now admittedly, the effect relies on a kind of poor-man’s-animation, a flip-card effect, if you will.

For what it’s worth, I actually think that all static infographics are challenged w/respect to visualizing change, and that we ultimately in many cases need moving pictures to best convey moving data.

that being said, i’m not really sure about visualizing this information as a sparkline? or, i guess more specifically, i’m not really sure that i get much value out of seeing 50+ sparklines stacked vertically on top of each other. I actually had a hard time using the presented visualizations to answer the questions you posed (trending, etc). IMO, sparklines are great micro-visualizations that can be embedded into a body of text to illustrate one specific point… however, to compare large volumes of data, wouldn’t a simple line graph of served effectively?

Agreed. And yet…in so many cases, it just ain’t rocket science. This is a simple spreadsheet:

http://jonudell.net/data/cpi.csv

If this info were just maintained in a master spreadsheet, and it had a row for Ivory Coast, and the new data came in tagged Côte d´Ivoire, it would be an obvious and trivial thing to reconcile that.

We shouldn’t need a tribe of “data geeks” to reverse-engineer simple stuff like this. Their skills should be applied to a different class of problem.

People need to begin to understand and apply some very basic principles of data management. It’s yet another example of how computational thinking needs to become one of the pillars of primary education along with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The harsh truth is this: data is messy because the world is messy. Borders shift. Metrics change. Data goes uncollected or missing.

But I’m hopeful posts like this will give the data geeks out there courage to push forward and produce informative graphics like yours — in spite of the hard work.