Motion Chart demonstrating changes in Live Register numbers over 5 years

Wait for the chart to load and then press the "play" symbol to see the chart in action.

Be patient - it may take a while to load the first time you visit this site. There may be some problems viewing it with some versions of flash and Internet Explorer - see the bottom of this article for more details.

• In these charts the colours and sizes of the circles are used to display additional attributes.
• Each entity (county in this case) can be selected and tracked over time.
• You can hover over any of the circles to see the relevant data for that circle for the selected week.
• You can change the X and Y axes to use any of the available data
• You can select regions (e.g. the border region) to see the data for the counties in that region
• You can change the X and Y axes to use linear or logarithmic scales
  

A larger version displaying all of the controls can be seen here.

Use our contact page if you would like to know more about this Google gadget and how you could use it to help you analyze and understand your data better.

I first spotted these charts in http://www.gapminder.com/ and I checked out whether I could use them for a client's data. It turns out that Google bought the company that owned the technology and you can use it for free.

I created the example above using data from the CSO on Ireland's unemployment figures. It's the same data as I used in a previous article that demonstrated dynamic maps (now updated with data up to and including January 2010 - see here).

See the the data notes in a pdf file for details on the data sources, the manipulations performed on the data and the assumptions that were made.

Problems viewing the chart?
You may need to use Firefox or Safari (or upgrade your version of Flash) to view this demo. I have sometimes noticed problems with Google motion charts when using Internet Explorer with Flash version 9. I will try to sort them out, but in the meantime, try another browser. When using chrome, right-click on the chart and select "open frame in new window" if it does not work immediately.