One data presentation I saw recently is one project by the Senseable City Lab at DUSP regarding the home countries of international students at MIT. The like is http://senseable.mit.edu/mit-world
The data connects each international student’s home country with MIT. The map draws an arch between MIT and one country’s centroid. For example, if a student is from Canada, an arc is drawn between Canada’s center and MIT. The arc is colored blue for undergraduate students and red for graduate students. A thicker arc from a country indicates more students are from that country. The data is also stratified by year; so a line chart below the world map shows the change in number of students across years.
I think the audience groups may be: 1. the administrative staff at MIT, because they should care about the school’s basic statistics and trend; 2. the prospective students and families, because they care about school’s diversity; 3. the current international students enrolled, because they may be curious about where they situate. The goal is to present numbers in a vivid way and to highlight countries that are outstanding.
I think visualizing data on the world map is appealing because it is straightforward to target the outstanding counties that deliver a large number of students. However, I think the centroid presentation is a little misleading because not necessarily the counties’ population concentrates at the center. But I acknowledge it is still effective to present the data this way. Also, I don’t understand the color of some countries; for example, China and Canada are colored red–maybe that means these countries have a large volume of students. Adding a legend may be helpful.