Timetric: Letting you tell a story
24th July 2009
It’s taken me a while to write about Timetric after I saw Andrew Walkingshaw present their software with Emma Mulqueeny at Local Gov Camp last month. Essentially, Timetric is a set of web services which allows you to do a number of nifty things with datasets.
Yeah, really.
As their name suggests their raison d’etre is “graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time”. Which is a subject both interesting and, like a lot of statistics, much abused. One of the things that I really like about Timetric is that they reference the source data they construct their graphs from.
They also allow you to embed their graphs into your own website, so I thought that I’d use the OECD’s figures on broadband subscriptions as an example. Below is the graph for the United Kingdom
So far, so good. We seem to see that broadband take up increased significantly over the period 2002 to 2008 but that it is now slowing, and that currently there are about 28 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants.
Now, if you move the mouse over the graph you’ll see that you can manipulate it to narrow down the values it shows along the X-axis. And it’s illuminating to see just how much changing these values can change the way the graph looks.
Using Timetric I can also compare the UK figures with other countries. Now, the UK is often compared unfavourably with South Korea, so below I’ve got a graph which compares the figures for the UK and “Korea”.
Now this is starting to get really interesting. Firstly, the graphs show quite a difference in shapes. Whereas the UK one shows a smooth curve the Korean one is jagged, it even drops at one point. Secondly, we can see how Korea got online a few years earlier than the UK did and at one point around 2002 the difference was quite marked. However, now the figures are about the same.
But quite a number of questions are provoked by this comparison graph. Why is the Korean graph so different? Do they collect their statistics in a different way? Did they redefine what they meant by broadband at some point? Do both countries define broadband in the same way? What are the relative speeds of the broadband in the two countries? Does Korea just mean South Korea or does it include North Korea as well? What is the average household occupation rates in the two countries?
Quite brilliantly, this just makes you want to dive more into the detail of the data and investigate some more. And if you do that then Timetric allows you to load your own data “series” into your account and then use your dashboard to compare the datasets. And that is what the best statistics should do, they should both illuminate a subject and also tease you enough so you want to find out more about it.
