Ireland's Unemployment (2005-2010)

This motion chart is also using the Google gadget (there are others available). This time I've used regional data available on the CSO site here.

I've varied the use a bit to show how versatile the gadget is and how you can use it to highlight a particular trend in your data. I wanted to concentrate on the changing rate of unemployment, so I made all of the bubbles the same size and got them to change colour according to the rate of unemployment. A snapshot of the starting and ending states really shows the change over the years - see the first two images below.

You can change the chart type to be a bar chart or a line graph, hide some regions, speed up or slow down the playback motion, change the dimensions depicted on either axis and add trails to the bubbles to see how things have changed over time.

In the third screen shot below I have used the line graph facility, selected Dublin and the Border region and then set the opacity of all the rest to zero.

In the fourth one, I set the "trails" feature to "on", selected Dublin and Midlands and then started play in Week 10, 2008. You can see how the unemployment rate is diverging.