To understand something, it is useful to have some basic data about that thing. For example, if someone tells you that a person weighs 180 pounds and is 6 feet tall, you can form a rather clear image of what that person looks like. If someone then shows you a picture of the person, your image becomes instantly clearer. You can now see the color of their eyes, the length of their hair, and the type of clothes they wear. The same idea applies to less mundane parts of our lives. If we said, for example, that China’s economy grew at more than 8% per year for the past 10 years, we understand that it grew very rapidly during that period, but if we then showed you a graph where China’s growth was plotted against the world average, the dramatically high rate of growth for China over that period would become abundantly and immediately clear.
Visualizing data is an essential part of understanding the events taking place all around us. We may be aware of them but until we see them, we may not grasp them fully, in terms of either context or scale. This 2006 TED talk by global health expert Hans Rosling is one of the best examples of data being presented in a visually appealing way so that the message becomes much clearer to the audience. Making pictures out of data is not a novel idea, but over the past few years it has become necessary for institutions all around the world to take information and present it in ways that are more engaging, more digestible, more accessible, and more beautiful.
At the IDB Energy Division, we are committed to making data easy to understand and use. To that end, we have built an online tool called the Energy Database. The tool includes a series of 11 interactive, online data visualizations that use fully comparable data and visualize it in beautiful and innovative ways for investors, policymakers, and researchers to better comprehend how energy is produced, traded, transformed, consumed, and regulated throughout Latin America and other parts of the world. On our website, users can create graphics that very clearly show how clean electricity generation in Latin America really is, how much coal is produced in Colombia every year, or how much natural gas is imported by the Dominican Republic.
The Energy Database has information dating back to 1971 for every country in Latin America that is a member of the IDB, and users can create interactive pictures as Sankey diagrams, time series, chord graphs, pie charts, or bar graphs to track a country’s evolution over time or to compare it against its neighbors in either absolute or relative terms. Our users can, for example, track the progress of the nuclear industry in Brazil, see how energy consumption has become more efficient on Mexico, or read original documents on the governance structure of the electricity sector of Guatemala. For more information about the Energy Database webinar to be hosted in early 2016 contact [email protected].
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