Our World in Data
The state of the world -- charted
Today’s Friday resource has been mentioned before in Data Viz, and of course we’ve been following
’s work all week. Today let’s revisit Our World in Data and see what’s available on this rich and expansive website.Data Explorers
There are four main resources currently available, the most important of which by far is the collection of Data Explorers, a treasure trove of 4530 charts covering 115 topics. Some of the main pages are what I’d call “portals” leading broad and deep coverage. Other topics lead to significant single articles.
Here’s a sampling of major portals:
Environmental Impacts of Food Production
A few minor portals I personally found especially interesting:
And a small sample of article-length topics, also of personal interest:
Learning curves: What does it mean for a technology to follow Wright’s Law?
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
Yields vs. land use: how the Green Revolution enabled us to feed a growing population
There is so much more to explore, so have at it yourself!
Do keep in mind that not everything is up to date across the site, so be sure to check an article or chart’s publication date and the years covered by the data. Nevertheless, once you know the types of data available and have some basic background on the kinds of trends it’s possible to study, it shouldn’t be hard to research further on your own.
What areas of research at OWD are most interesting to you? What surprises you the most?
Other Resources
OWD’s other three main resources, also worth exploring are:
an SDG tracker
a teaching hub (with collections covering extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition, global health, population growth, and global education)
data insights — a new feature, offering “bite-sized” posts
The history of OWD by Max Roser, original founder, provides background into the origins of the projects, but it only covers through 2019 — with much change occurring after OWD’s work on the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020. See also various sub-topics on OWD’s About page.
Critique?
All this great data and visualizations are available for FREE! The organization is non-profit and open source. Thank you!
This is not to say one cannot offer a critique. One possible criticism may have to do with OWD’s tie with the Effective Altruism (EA) movement at Oxford. I’m attracted by deeper philosophical problems, so this kind of thing catches my eye. Specifically, there is the claim that “long-termism” tends to downplay or dismiss the present. Ethically speaking, any utilitarianism can be accused of sacrificing the few for the benefit of the many, and that includes sacrificing relatively few (humans) today for the sake of a much bigger and longer-term future, whether planetary or human. These are worthwhile matters to tackle another day. — Yesterday’s discussion of the libertarians’ worries about the protection of individual rights while pursuing larger social goals is clearly relevant.
Related philosophical issues have to do with techno-optimism, the go-to for anyone wanting to hold together present and future, with benefits for all, and with what I’ve called the problem of scale.
Finally — and this is something I’m just starting to think about — is a critical approach to data science in general. We’ve all heard Mark Twain’s quip about “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Well, data scientists are masters at manipulating data. How do we know what’s presented beautifully and persuasively is good science? How, as lay people, can we appropriate critically and ask good questions about what we’re learning from such vast resources as Our World in Data? An important article from 2014 launched a whole new field of critical data studies that draws on insights from critical theory.
