Story: China and India - 13 charts that show how the countries compare
By: Tania Branigan and George Arnett, from The Guardian "datablog"
In this story from The Guardian's "Datablog", Tania Branigan and George Arnett use raw data from a multitude of sources to pit the world's two most populated countries -India and China- against one another. Their comparison uses bar graphs for each country to visualize the difference between the each country , looking at areas such as unemployment rate, life expectancy, literacy and male to female employment ratios. One thing that was really great about this article was that it didn't include too many numbers or complicated charts, it was very simple, easy to read, and quite interesting to see the numbers in bar graph form.
The simple, wide bar graphs were easy to understand, labelled clearly, and each chart had a one-sentence description of what exactly the numbers reflected, as well as clearing up any complicated words. For example, neonatal fatalities was a category Branigan and Arnett graphed for readers, but in bold they included that "[the] neonatal mortality rate is the number of babies dying before reaching 28 days of age, per 1,000 live births in a given year". It seems that the data was presented as clearly as possible and with as much explanation as was necessary.
Though there wasn't an interactive element in the article, they could have included a map that allowed readers to see a breakdown (even for maybe one or two categories) of where exactly the most literate places were located within both countries. Having said this, it isn't really necessary to include any extra graphics, as this is already a very short, succinct article.
It would be quite simple to create a similar story for B.C., perhaps comparing British Columbia's data to other provinces, or cities within the province to one another. Most of this information could be obtained through the government website or even statscan. Though, one issue could be that a lot of cities in the same province might have quite similar numbers (in metro Vancouver for example), which could make a bar-graph less effective in plotting the data in a way that is easy for readers to understand.
For the most part, the aspects Branigan and Arnett looked at for China and India would be obtainable for a journalist in B.C., the only one that would likely be hard to obtain would be the number of nuclear warheads.
Ultimately this story could quite easily be created in B.C., though most of these topics are widely covered by local news anyway so there might not be a huge amount of interest in this sort of comparison. From the beginning of the story, the reader is drawn in by noting that China and India each contain more than one sixth of the world's population in the very first sentence.
