Introduction
Our generation cannot live without the Internet. The anxiety of discounting the Internet can drive one crazy just in few minutes, causing one to lose chances of keeping up with the latest information. However, the Internet is still not fully covered globally now. Even more, as “high technology” and a “rare resource,” only people in a few developed countries could offer and had access to the Internet two decades ago. With technology has developed so fast and spread so widely, the percentage of usage of the Internet has risen worldwide. Due to the differences among countries, their unequal resource has resulted in different Internet usage.
For this project, I focus on visualizing the worldwide percentage of individuals using the Internet from 2000-2017, which could help see how a country has developed directly.
Process
For this project, I collected from UNdata, which is a global database by the United Nations (UN) statistical system and other international agencies. As the data has more than just two dimensions, Openrefine is a great helper to help clean my data and make processing it easier. Then, I used the cleaned Internet Usage dataset from the UN data system and imported it to Tableau Public.
This data was based on three dimensions: the Internet usage percentages, countries/regions, and years(from 2000-2017). Observing the technology development of a country through the change of Internet usage percentages is the primary goal. Therefore, I decided to make this visualization project in two ways, one is primarily based on countries/regions, and the other is mainly based on Years.
I decided to use a map to deliver the first attempt as its primary category was countries/regions. Different countries/regions were color-coded based on the percentage numbers: from light yellow(representing low Internet usage)to darker greenish-blue (representing high Internet usage.) Then, gathering the map of each year. People can then view the graph to see how technology has developed in different places by distinguishing color changes.
For the second attempt, I focused on Years more. It shared the same color-coding with attempt 1.
Results and Discussion
Besides what people can view how worldwide Internet usage has changed, people can also search for places to see the evaluation through color changes. When people highlight the area, it will directly give detailed information about the place, the percentage, and the Year.
I started my data visualization by working with different kinds of possibilities. However, from the line chart to the pie chart, I found a map could be my best choice. My inspiration was from the Covid-19’s Spreading in the US Map, and I found it tells its data and locations very engaged, and similar maps will keep updated every day. However, it was tough for me to see the previous maps; therefore, I thought it was a good idea to combine all the maps from each year together to get the percentage evaluation much more obvious.
Tableau offers different kinds of templates, and people can try whatever they want. It is very user-friendly, especially for new user who have never exposed to visualization. Through its official tutorial, a new user can quickly start to do their visualization stuff. When I was trying other forms, I found that bars were also clear media to tell the evaluation process. In attempt 2, people will get their eyes on the color-coded bars, then move to Years, and then countries. Those two different attempts intentionally offer two different to view the data. Yellow is bright and light, greenish-blue is relatively dark and solid. This can easily guide people too think yellow must represent a low percentage of the Internet individual using, and greenish-blue is on the opposite side.
Reflection
Overall, Tableau is a tool that helps new users start to do visualization easily and quickly. Its user inference has relatively straightforward guidelines to follow and tutorial videos that helped present the Percentage of Individuals Using the Internet in a good way. Trough the map I made, I was surprisingly found how much progress many countries/regions have made on Internet usage.
However, there were still some parts that need improvement. Even though I love the idea of placing 2000-2017 maps together to see the results. The maps were tiny, and the zoom function was not very user-friendly.
As for future steps, I wish to explore the visualization result more and create more visually rich data visuals. Plus, trying a more interactive and intuitive method to make visualization result.