Anyone who’s had to deal with large amounts of data will be well aware that sometimes a visual can be extremely helpful in understanding that data. This map of states party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that I tweeted out last November is a case in point:
Even if I were particularly skilled at creating visualizations, I might not always have the time available to do so, or to locate the data I need. Having access to a service that already has the necessary data and that can use that data to create useful visualizations with just a few mouse clicks is a great thing.
Knoema is just such a service. I don’t recall when I first learned of it, but I finally had the chance to try it out last week. It took very little time to create this chart (using data from the US Religious Statistics, 2014 dataset) that would be useful when I next teach my Politics and Religion course:
This map showing the self-reported non-religious world population didn’t take long, either:
In addition to saving their visualizations and creating presentations from them, users can download the data used to create them.
There’s a lot of data available for use at Knoema’s site, as well as a gallery of infographics for browsing. If the data needed for creating the desired visualization isn’t already available on the site, there’s an option to upload a dataset.
For the casual user, Knoema seems to provide a quick and easy way to visualize data. If you’ve used Knoema, what has your experience of it been like? Do you have other favorite visualization tools? Let us know in the comments.
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Andy Wilkinson]
