Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Visualization at Eurostat

Last week I was in Luxembourg, where I did the Visual Trumpery talk a couple of times. In between, I had time to chat with statisticians from both STATEC (Luxembourg's statistical institute) and Eurostat.

The Eurostat folks showed me some infographics and data visualizations and tools they've done recently. I'm fond of their Regions and Cities project and their Statistical Atlas. The former let's you visualize many variables in multiple ways: Maps, dot plots, tables, etc.:



And the latter is simply a great source for data to play with. You can select any variable, see it visualized on a map, and then download its data (scroll down on the Legend, on the bottom-right corner of each screen.) As far as I've seen —I downloaded a couple of csv files,— the data is already formatted tidily, which is nice. I wish more sources of would provide spreadsheets without useless headers, footnotes, comments, and in long format, rather than wide: