Different Depictions of the Same Data

Going through the blogs, I noticed an interesting pattern this morning. Over at Information is Beautiful, there was an infographic comparing the size of different countries' militaries. Specifically, it showed the number of active soldiers per 100,000 people of several respective countries. In this infographic, North Korea is huge, with 4,711 active soldiers per citizen. In this light, the U.S.'s military seems pretty small, in 45th place, and China's is even smaller, at 124th place.

This other infographic, from Chart Porn, declares that North Korea has 1.1 million. Even though that's the smallest nominal-size military on the chart, it's put up in huge red highlights above the other countries listed. Nominally, China is now the biggest military in the world and the U.S. is number 2.

http://www.onlineschools.org/blog/the-craziest-country-in-the-world/

Both charts try to emphasize North Korea's huge military with respect to its population and GDP, but go about it very differently. Personally, despite the use of area to represent 1-dimensional data, the first chart is much better at showing just how ridiculous North Korea's military is compared to the actual size and resources of the country, whereas in the second chart you have to look all over the place to piece together the full picture, and the nominal rankings of the countries is confusing when looked at separately from the rest of the infographic.

Posted via email from Infographic's Posterous