Gapminder is an international non-profit organization with a mission to better use statistics for “minding the gaps” in socioeconomic indicators within and among populations. Gapminder World features colorful animated graphs that show trends over time in a very compelling way.

In this video, Gapminder founder Hans Rosling interprets a graph about global development over the last 200 years:

[11/30 Update: If YouTube is blocked for you, you can watch this same video (but without narration) here, or try this video on TeacherTube.]

The software behind Gapminder is called Trendalyzer. Google acquired Trendalyzer in 2007. Now you can create your own Trendalyzer animations using Google Spreadsheets and the Google Gadget Motion Chart.

Science librarians and researchers will appreciate this motion chart from the site Eigenfactor.org, a project of Dr. Carl Bergstrom’s lab at the University of Washington. The motion chart shows the relative impact of scholarly journals over time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 2:53 pm by Alison Aldrich, and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.