I’ve been exploring the LaTeX package animate which, as the name suggests, facilitates animated graphics.
I’ve been using the basic features of the package to generate an animation of population pyramids for Ireland, showing the evolution of age cohorts in the population since the first post Independence Census, in 1926. This file is a pdf file, so it can be saved and viewed locally. Never knew pdf was so flexible!
More examples of the package are available here.
It’d great but it’d be even more fun if you had the projections as well!
it’s also good to compare to UK and Europe. People don’t grip how young the irish population is.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/informationGateway.php has loads of data and projections.
Excellent animation Aidan, didn’t know .pdf files could do that!
@antoin
Thanks..very good suggestions. Was thinking of getting the projections also, and that’s a great link, thanks. I’ll also check out the comparative aspects. At the moment, I’ve been getting up to speed on the mechanics of putting these files together..it takes a bit of pre-processing.
@stephen
Thanks indeed. Yes, it was a revelation to me too! I think you’re seeing a key component of what e-textbooks will look like. Imagine a tex textbook on micro or macro with this sort of stuff. I would guess the next logical step is for a package which would enable a lot more interactivity.
One other thought – for clarity and simplicity it may make more sense to show only one side of the pyramid. I think this will make it a lot easier for a non-specialist audience to grasp. For the typical use that will be made of these, comparing male and female birth and survival rates isn’t generally that important (unless you are designing toilet arrangements for a bridge club or something).
Edward Tufte, who is famous for his book ‘The visual display of quantitative information’ just got appointed to Obama’s Recovery Independent Advisory Panel.
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I have not checked in here for a while as I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are really great quality so I guess I’ll add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend.
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