The visionary David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has taken some data and turned it into pictures. In this instance he has turned swine flu statistics into coloured-in maps and tables. Visualisation can often be a useful tool to help people to understand things. Certainly claims that ‘the USA have had more deaths from swine flu than any other country’ can sound worrying until you examine the ideas further. I’d really like to see more information in this format, it’s a lot easier to remember bits of red and blue on maps than tables of text. If departments of health or the World Heath Organisation made information freely available in a standardised format it would be possible to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to make maps automatically. Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org developed software to turn global health statistics into graphs, which turned out to be so good it was bought by Google. As a consequence, lectures at schools of medicine and public health all around the world became more interesting. If someone could make software to make maps using this precedent that would be much appreciated by students and policy makers everywhere.
- Dom
