Gap Minder Clone

Try it out here!

This project is an attempt to mimic the features of the well known Gap-Minder interactive chart, using the Bokeh interactive visualization library. This started as the final project for the DataCamp course on Bokeh taught by Bryan Van de Ven. I enjoyed the class a lot but, all of the course projects were done in the browser, within an environment set up with local variables to allow students to focus on the course content. I really enjoyed this project, so I decided to revisit it by building the project from scratch locally and adding some extra features along the way.

Features

The original project allowed users to:

• Select a value for x and y axes
• Select a year to display via slider
• Hover over points to see the various values assocaited with each point

Added features:

• Select a value to scale point size as well as max and min point size
• Select between linear and log scale for x, y and size
• Play, Stop, Reverse, Forward and Back buttons to move through year values
• Moved legend outside of plot area to prevent it from obscuring view of plot
• Reads data in from AWS S3 stored flat file to allow for the app to be hosted on Heroku

Features I would like to add:

• Input that allows user to set Play/Reverse speed
• Toggle visibility of Legend Legend is now outside of chart
• Map visual like the actual gapminder dash?
• A click tool that marks points to follow
• Smoother animations through transition-like callbacks
• Is there a way to make the dashboard reactively sized? or even reactively arranged?

Thoughts

An effect similar to animation can be achieved in bokeh through the use of callbacks that attach a periodic callback that removes itself on completion. This method was used to implement the play and reverse buttons. I like the effect it creates, allowing the user to observe the shift in values over time, but I am left wanting something similar to transitions in D3. I believe "transition" animations can be achieved with a bit of work. Similar to the way that I've made the play button "play" through the year values, it is possible to create a subset of interpolated values to move through with a periodic callback. The method of interpolation would then provide the means of defining the speed and nature of this "transition". I would like to explore this, either with this project or an other project that I have in mind.