GDP, Life Expectancy, Population

[HarshaDevulapalli]

I have access to a dataset of the GDP, Life Expectancy and Populations of all countries in the world from 1950s to 2013. I would like to make a small multiples version of the dataset, with each multiple having a comparsion of one of the parameters (GDP, Life Expectancy, Population) with its performance on par with the continent and the world.

Data Source : The Country-GDP-Timeseries.csv

Inspirations :

• https://flowingdata.com/2011/07/05/when-crime-happens-in-major-cities/
• https://flowingdata.com/2011/02/10/gamers-mimic-the-real-life-football-season/

Story issue checklist

My pitch was #13

• My pitch has been approved (see PITCHING.md)
• My story issue links to my pitch issue
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• I have received two comments of peer feedback
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• I have received editorial feedback

[ghost]

My feedback is to think about how this project would be framed, what narratives (if any) would you lend to this data? What story would it tell? (Perhaps as Gianna noted, highlighting how war and other events affect life-expectancy)

[gcgruen]

Maybe it could also be interesting, to overlay all graphs of one kind into one graphic and highlight a few that have interesting patterns.

[HarshaDevulapalli]

Originally, I had intended to produce a small multiples map of the GDP, Populations and Life Expectancy of all countries in the world. The idea was to see if a small multiples would be useful in determining how countries fare with each other. If the axes weren't constant, each one of them has the potential to explain a country's "growth" or "decline". But with constant axes, it is evident to see two kinds of categories that countries are clumped into : One with really high GDPs and nearly filling up the figure and another with mostly really thin lines.

I believe, that while as a story it would be not be too useful - i think, my code has to be tweaked just a little bit to produce these for every country in the world as images that can be uploaded to Wikipedia Commons. I believe, it can serve some purpose in illustrating a particular index.

Populations of Countries of the World

If kept to scale, apart from the countries of China, India, Brazil, US and Indonesia, most countries would look like flat lines. Hence I chose to retain them to their own scales, instead of keeping a common one.
For most countries since the 1950s, the growth has been linear - is that a measure of peace? Or is it the growth before the fall?

Life Expectancy

This is something I've kept to scale because no country has yet managed to find ways of getting most humans to live beyond 100. It shows you that almost all countries in the world have managed to make significant progress when it comes to life expectancy figures. The only dips in the figure happen when there is large scale conflicts such as war or genocide. Refer to Rwanda in the late 80s, China in the 60s, and Syria currently.

These three figures are interesting numbers to poke into and each of them has their own story to tell. But merely to illustrate, these would be useful artefacts to be available publicly on Wikipedia. In its own bare form, it allows people to annotate these figures and let them tell stories on their own.

[playfairbot]

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot! Would you mind posting the appropriate checklist in the main body of your issue? You might have posted it as the first comment, but it turns out it works way better in the actual body of the issue - just go up to the veeery top right and click the pencil icon to edit. You'll probably want to edit the comment to copy the checklist, then edit the original issue to paste it in. Thanks! 🙏

[playfairbot]

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot! Thanks for posting your story issue, but would you mind adding editing the original issue to add the first draft of your image? You have my sincere apologies, but it's easier for dumb robots like me when the comments are only used for updates. Thanks! 🙏

[playfairbot]

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot! Would you mind linking to your pitch issue by using the '#1' method (but with your actual pitch issue number)? It'll hopefully help us keep things neat and organized. Thanks a zillion! 🙏

[jsoma]

Pare, pare, pare it down! It's easy to make a million small multiples, but tough to highlight the stories inside 😉 . If you'd like to viz all of them, it might be best to put them all on as light gray lines, then pick 6 or so countries that you think are interesting and draw their line on top of the background lines. So it's small multiples even though every chart actually has every country on it! Just an idea, though.