For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a set of data (found here) which measures the happiness of different countries. This datas is drawn from a project called the World Happiness Report (this is the website) which uses a scale called the Cantril ladder (learn more here!).
I wanted to create a visualization that would allow users to see the respective happiness 'levels' globally while also being able to see the change in these levels over time and analyze and possible patterns.
In my visualization, the data is represented as smiles and frowns set on a map with their location corresponding to their country. If the 'score' of the country is under five, there will be a frown. From five to seven there will be a straight line, and any country with over seven gets a smile. This is based on a scale out of ten.
To interact with the visualization, try using the dropdown to change the years, or hovering over the dots to see the country and where they fall on the one to ten happiness scale.
One pattern I noticed during this project is the disparity in happiness between rich and poor countries. Living in a capitalist world, this makes sense, however it feels unfair that the place you are born should dictate your happiness throughout your life.
I wonder what this data would have looked like had been taken 100, 200, 1,000 or even 10,000 years back.