Ishita

Lab 1: Google Fusion Tables

So I have decided to do my final project on the affect of migration on happiness. I have been reading journal articles and personal testimonials for a while but wasn't sure how to pull it together. Recently, I found a study published earlier this year in the Jornal of Happiness Studies that correlate the happiness of a country with its rate of migration. It is called //Happiness and International Migration// and includes data from 84 countries, derived from the World Values Survey between 1981 and 2004. The emigration rates are from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and net migration rates are from the United Nations. The file can be downloaded from the link given below:

I was interested in visually representing the level of happiness of each country on a single map. For this lab, I used google fusion tables to try and achieve this goal.

//The process//

I first took the data from the journal article and created a simple google doc. I couldn't figure out how to import this data to fusion tables because the home page is very minimalist in design and prompts you to browse the existing data. But I found the help blurb and was able to convert the data to make it available to fusion tables.

From here, I clicked on "Visualize" and chose "Intensity map". The resulting visualization is shown below:



When you hover over or click a country, it shows you the name and its average happiness. Like so:



Just because I was curious, I also experimented with other visualization options. For example, the satellite map view:



Although for my purposes, this view is not very valuable, it might be fun to play around with it and correlate it with other physical factors. For instance, I might want to see how weather patterns in certain countries affect their happiness. Having majored in psychology, I might hypothesize that countries that get a certain average of sunlight are, on average, happier than others.

//My take on the tool//

Personally, I found google fusion tables fun to work with. It was an easy and quick tool that accomplishes the task. But I found it too simplistic at times... I cannot change much on the resultant visualization given to me. I cannot change the colours on the map and I cannot change their size or zoom in and out on the map. Although there was an option of subdivided the countries into different sections (by territories or states), I did not explore that possibility. What I would like to try next is the merge option. The journal has migration data that I would like to map out and merge with this visualization to see how that shows up. I found it a little hard to understand the migration data in the journal so maybe Ill try that for my next lab. My personal conclusion for this tool is that it is helpful but maybe not the best if you want something more mouldable that you may want to edit on your own later.