Recreating Gapminder in Tableau: A Humble tribute to Hans Rosling

“My interest is not data, it’s the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers.” — Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was a visionary. He had a way with numbers. A physician, teacher and statistician, he challenged millions of peoples’ biased notions about basic issues like poverty and population growth. He did not achieve this by giving mundane lectures or boring presentations but by using clever visualisations, which ushered in an era of smart data visualisation techniques. Rosling, together with his son and daughter-in-law, co-founded the Gapminder Foundation to develop Trendalyzer, a software to convert international statistics into moving, interactive graphics.

In the above video, Hans Rosling takes us through 200 years of global development. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’, he tells the story of the world’s 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers — in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans showed how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine to be.

I will try to recreate the same visualization (as shown in the video/talk) to analyse how Life Expectancy in years (health) and GDP per capita (wealth) have changed over time in the world for various countries.This will a small tribute to the master storyteller who passed away on 7 February 2017.

Prerequisites

This article assumes a basic familiarity with Tableau and it’s functions.

Data

We require data pertaining to the following parameters :

• Life Expectancy in years
• Income per person (GDP/capita, PPP$ inflation-adjusted)
• Population, Total
• Regions of the World