Gapminder – visualising human trends

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting 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.

Underlying much of Gapminder’s work is a software program called ‘Trendalyser’, which crunches huge amounts of data to present visually stunning, animated interactive graphs. Google have taken on the development of Trendalyser, and are starting to incorporate some of its functionality into GoogleDocs and Gadgets.

The full Gapminder data set is available here, and you can manipulate the data to create your own datasets and interactive graphs. In addition Gapminder produce videocasts highlighting some key statistics and trends. Below is one example, focussing on the development of Bangladesh.