Visualizing Development and Poverty Reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan, China

Visualizing development and poverty reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan, China: using a drill-down choropleth map and time-series graphs

       
Abstract— How do we visualize a large number of counties and show to the user the amount of net rural income earned every year, from the 1990 to 2007? Our approach to this visualization is to present a story for our user to understand the background of Guizhou and Yunnan, before diving deep into poverty indicators - the net rural income at county level, and the GDP indicators at province level. We use a choropleth map for our user to understand the terrain better in these two provinces, and we allow broad comparisons to be made across counties and closer examination at the GDP from 1978 to 2005.
Index Terms—Information visualization, visual analytics, poverty, China, Guizhou, Yunnan.

Introduction

The problem encountered is not new: Professor Donaldson, armed with data after years of research and fact-finding, now has an important conclusion to tell the world. The visualization of the data to support his paper is made in Excel, but it is not the most impressive looking line graph in the 21st century.
How do we visualize data sets that are sufficient large – they start from the 1970s to 2000s? We do not merely want to present this information, but we wish to invite users to explore the data further and to draw their own conclusions afterwards.

How do we visualize a large number of counties and show to the user the amount of net rural income earned every year, from the 1990 to 2007? Yunnan, being the well known province compared to Guizhou, might ring a bell to people because of its tourist sites. However, our difficulty lies in presenting the sixteen prefectures, making up more than 200 counties in total, (and that is just for Yunnan) without overwhelming the user with data.

Janice Chua is an undergraduate student at Singapore Management University pursuing her Bachelor in Information Systems Management....