Floral Cartogram – How Do We Govern Our World?

This data visualization was included into the World Data Visualization Prize 2023 poster longlist.

The poster displays Worldwide Governance Indicators for 170 countries. Each flower represents a country. A flower has 6 petals that represent 6 different indicators. Each petals combines 10 colored arcs to encode 10 years of data. Red-white-blue color scheme encodes indicator values from -2.5 to +2.5 with higher values corresponding to better governance.

170 countries × 10 years × 6 indicators = 10,200 data points.

Each flower initially was located on the poster using country central coordinates (centroid) and equirectangular projection, then “force” Vega transformation has been applied to make sure the flowers (especially those in Europe) are not overlapped.

The poster was created using Vega visualization grammar.

Vega JSON code: https://github.com/avatorl/Deneb-Vega/tree/main/floral-cartogram