My latest University project was to create a visualisation of choice with another class member.
Stephen and I came across a complete set of data from New Zealand to all other trading countries. I must point out here that NZ does a comparatively good job to the rest of the world in terms of data availability. Some countries that will remain unnamed (*cough* Australia *cough*) provide their data in PDF form 🙁
This huge table was just screaming out to be visualised. We took inspiration from Minard’s effective French wine export map as well as from a global trade visual. Both of these visualisations use the line width to indicate the quantity of exports between countries. Lines start off thick and then thin out as it branches off into countries. Our goal became to take this static idea and present it in a dynamic way using HTML5 technologies.
By combining StatsNZ data and country locations collected using Google’s geolocation API, we were able to produce a JSON datastructure that could easily be adapted to support the visualisation of other countries. The following diagram breaks down the process:
And the final product!
It can also be viewed live in my testing folder here: Export Visualisation
Special thanks to my group member Stephen and to StatsNZ, and the Google Maps API for their awesome data.
Update: The code is now available on github.