Average Life Expectancy of Countries in Africa
I really struggled to get any sort of map off the ground using Google Fusion Maps. It literally took me the entire weekend just to figure out how to use the right data and how to embed it into the blog and I still don’t think I’m doing this right!!!
I really would LOVE to be able to do this, and maybe if there was a way for my group to find data on Voting Ages in the United States we could use this program, but the fact of the matter is the Fusion Maps is really picky with its data – by that I mean, it really doesn’t work unless you have super accurate data that’s presented in a certain way.
The map shows the life expectancy for countries in Africa between 3 – 100. Red being the youngest deaths and blue being the oldest.
You raise an important concern with regard to visualizing data: the format of the data needs to be just right. No matter how powerful your mapping (or other visualization) processing software, the structure and contents of your data set dictate much of the success or failure of the end result. Can you say more about the data set(s) that failed to work in Fusion? Were you able to determine what aspect of that data was causing trouble for Fusion? In class today and Wednesday, we will discuss techniques that can be used to locate and work with “clean” data sets.
A question on the map you have embedded: what do the colors other than red and blue mean? I gather they are between the extremes of red and blue that are detailed in the caption, but I don’t know what order they fall in (e.g., is yellow closer to blue or red?). Also, what quantities are represented by each color? The caption mentions a range of 3-100, but it isn’t clear how this corresponds to the colors.
I can write an entire blog posts of all the failed data I tried to map – augh!
Originally I was hoping to map the average youth vote (ages 18-24) in the 2008 elections, but the data imported to my fusion table wouldn’t map. Then I tired other ways to organize the data in my own google spreadsheets but then it still wouldn’t map! The I tried other fusion tables online hoping to find the data I was looking for, but the fusion tables were either not the data i needed or not mappable data.
Then I gave up on the whole voting thing, and then tried to see Corn Production in the United States and that while I could get the mappable data for that, I couldn’t get the State boundaries to work so all the map showed was one, big red United States and there was no difference as to which state had more corn production – ugh!
Then I called my friend who is a History major, nearly giving up on the map entirely, and he helped me find data that was more graphical – Average Life Expectancy in Africa. I managed to find THE RIGHT TABLE for the picky program,the country boundaries for Africa, and graph the the information.
The gradient tool didn’t work as well as I would liked, so I used Red -> Blue to show Young -> Old. Meaning that Yellow and Orange are closer to Red the low end of life expectancy than Purple or Light Blue, which is closer to the higher end of the life expectancy.