Blog Post #3: Don't Panic

Don’t panic was chalk full of visual data. Hans Rosling does an incredible job leading us down this information filled journey. The graph I want to analyze are the one that compares Malawi and Sweden’s Income and relative poverty. The compression of incomes also shows up what relative poverty is and were the extreme poverty line. Personally, this was a huge realization of what could be considered poverty and made me wonder what the United States relative poverty line looked like, cueing me in that is a great graph.

Visually proximity and similarity are very important concepts in this graph. Proximity between the two data sets show us the gap between them but that the lines are also continuous. What we focus on is the tallest part of the data sets, but understand that they don’t just stop at a certain point. Then similarity is also important. We see both peek and have a bell shape. This gives up the impression of population. The graph without us realizing it we see there is a greater population than in Sweden. Rosling tells us the majority of the population is in extreme poverty. To the eye we can see this much faster than he can tell us, which allows us to understand his words better. The similar shape of these data sets gives us a relative view and tells us more information than we may think at first.

When I see the graphs and charts the Rosling was presenting I gain a lot of information at once. Rosling talks us though the graphs to slow down our quick comprehension of the visualizing. When I see a graph I look at all the words and then try to understand what it is showing me, with these graphs there isn’t a whole lot of words. This requires me to listen to the speaker and slowly take in this graph, which I think boosts my understand and makes me apricate the graphs even more.