Swedish professor, Hans Rosling, and his organization, Gapminder, have carved a niche for themselves for their ability to wow people with easy-to-understand graphic and interactive representations of world views driven by publicly accessible data and statistics. In keeping with their mission to “promote sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels“, Gapminder makes available all their data visualizations in the form of  videos or colorful PDF charts/Flash presentations for free. (All the videos are also up on the Gapcast YouTube channel).

All their videos follow a common format – a picture-in-picture style video of Hans Rosling in one corner providing an interpretative commentary on the accompanying interactive visualization – as in the 200 years that changed the world video linked here – and they usually show data-supported correlations between indices such as income, disease occurrence, infant mortality, population, and many others, for cities and regions around the world. Many serve to debunk common myths, and all, without exception, trigger thought and discussion. In addition to this one, Gapminder has visualizations on –

• Swine flu alert! News/Death ratio: 8176
• HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals (TED Talk 2009)
• Breast Cancer Statistics and Cervical Cancer Statistics
• Shanghai, New York, Mumbai
• What stops population growth?
• Debunking myths about the “third world” (TED talk 2006)
• Reducing Child Mortality
• Chimpanzees know better? (Speakers@Google)
• Turkey meets France
• The seemingly impossible is possible (TED Talk 2007)
• Chile, a developing country?
• 10 Years In, 10 Years Out (Google Zeitgeist 2008)

The great thing about the fancy Trendalyzer software that is used in all these “bubble” visualizations is that it is now available for free, thanks to Google. All one needs to do is use the free Google Gadget called Motion Chart. Using Motion Chart, anyone can make a Gapminder-like bubble graph that they can publish on their web-page or blog.

Gapminder is truly an awesome resource for high school students for their social studies project and/or research work.