There’s a fair bit of of publicly available data that can be used to answer questions about global trends. Previously, I’ve used data from the UN and the UK (often the Office for National Statistics), but I’ve only just discovered the commendable data service being provided by the British paper “The Guardian“. They encourage public access to (and visualization of) the data on which their articles are based. This is done by tidying up data and putting it in publicly accessible Google spreadsheets.
Plot reproducible from free online data using R
With all this data available, it’s possible to carry out reproducible research and analysis, such as the plot opposite. For this you require an easy (and free) way to to carry out analysis using the datasets. Perhaps the most powerful way is to use something like
R, which can be issued commands to carry out analysis,
generate visualizations, etc. For maximum reproducibility, I’ve been trying to write R code that accesses these data sources directly, without having to download and tweak intermediate data files. This should make it easy to analyse datasets and produce attractive plots – for example, of estimated life expectancy and population size.
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