Water or Internet?
Water or Internet is a data visualization project comparing population percentage across the world with access to water and internet. This was part of Interactive Data Visualization class at Pilot Year - CIID.
Water is unquestionably the most essential element for survival, but in today’s world, things like Internet access are also becoming increasingly important. We started by looking at scenarios in various countries for the improvement of internet access over the last 15-years, against improvements in basic water supply. Our idea was to find the reality of changing priorities in the current situation in the world. What is becoming more powerful? Water or Internet? We used UN data sets comparing improvement by percent of population with access to water and internet in the last 15 years.
Our main goal was to compare differences in improvement in water supply and Internet access over a period of time. For the data visualisation we decided to stick to simple bars representing changes as lengths, showing all the changes for each country to visually compare them. Also one can sort this data in various ways by name, changes in water and internet and income group of country.
This analysis helped us to understand how developing countries have changed their priorities and are pushing hard to keep up with the changing world yet struggling with basic needs. There were some interesting cases where changes in Internet access were dramatically high against decreasing excess to basic water. After some more in-depth research we found interesting stories due to natural calamities, war or other drastic changes.
Faculty: Shawn Allen, David A. Mellis
Co-students: Alice Pintus, Yu-Min Chen (Yves)
Following flash visualization shows changes in water access in blue and change in internet access in yellow for each country. In the visualization all the countries are also classified under various income groups with different colors.
Click on the various color bars within the circle to change sorting order. You can also find any county's data by typing the name in the text box.