A new animated population pyramid for Germany 1950–2050

Today Destatis released a new projection of Germany’s population by 2060 accompanied by an all new animated population pyramid. It is the first population pyramid that really moves upwards.

In case the above doesn’t display in your preferred language, here are the distinct links for english, french, spanish, russian, german.

The pasted screenshot is the mobile version you will automatically see on small screens. There is much more to explore on larger displays, as birthyears are labeled directly, you can lock an outline for comparison and there are four different variants to choose from, so that you can judge the outcome with different assumptions.

Apart from starting the animation with the (Play) button you can navigate through the years by mousewheel, left/right cursor keys or on touch devices directly by swiping up or down on the pyramid.

Envy the Data Visualisation Centre? Not any more.

If you follow the ONS Data Visualisation Centre you will be amazed by the fireworks of interactive graphics that they regularly produce. At least I am. Here are just a few recent examples that caught my eye.

  

Now who wouldn’t want to install a similar group in their organisation. Apart from the management task at hand (including fighting against or around an established CMS in most cases) people often ask where and how they can get their staff and colleagues up to speed with all the current technology, what are the tools, how do they work and what media partners could be interested in possible collaboration or syndication.

Luckily there are conferences for that and in 2014 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will be hosting such an event in England that will answer most of those questions. It is the well known Graphical Web Conference and takes place in this top notch venue in Winchester from August 27–30th, 2014. The theme will be “visual storytelling”.

The Graphical Web focus is on open web technologies such as SVG, CSS, Canvas, WebGL and the respective JavaScript libraries that make dealing with these graphic formats a lot easier. Front and center being D3 the data driven documents library that has become a de-facto standard in the data-visualisation world.

Have a look at the conference website and follow @TheGraphicalWeb on Twitter for the latest updates.

The Graphical Web 2013 Conference

I have long argued for doing data visualizations in-house and even there within the people who know about the subject-matters. Statistical organizations suffer from a lot of friction by outsourcing everything software related and even the arguments with internal IT-departments not always result in timely innovation.

Luckily data visualization on the web has become less than a rocket science and especially the ONS Data Visualisation Center has shown excellent work in this space, that was done in-house by statisticians.

 

Therefore I feel it being appropriate to invite the followers of this blog to The Graphical Web 2013 Conference, which takes place October 21.-23. in San Francisco. The conference may be known to you as SVGopen, which it was called until 2012 but the name-change reflects the wider use of different graphical technologies such as Canvas or WebGL. However they all have in common that they are open standards and don’t require any plugins.

Conference submissions are welcome until June 9th and National Statistical Institutions have certainly a lot of material to showcase in this realm. The conference will give you the opportunity to get in contact with developers from your favorite Library (D3), browser vendors and w3c experts. Also expect a lot of representatives from Adobe to attend.