The Goal of this tabbed shiny app was to explore and compare global trends in urbanization and population. In order to create this set of graphs I used data from gapminder https://www.gapminder.org/data/.
The main manipulation for this data consisted of placing the data in a tall format and joining the different data files into one “full_data”. I manipulated the data using the gather command for each of the data sets to place them into a tall format. Then I used the filter command to only have data past 1960.I did this for each individual dataset. In order to combine all the datasets, I used an “inner_join” command. Finally I mutated it again to recode country names for the choropleths.
The shiny app was separated into 4 tabs. The first tab shows a line plot that allows the user to explore one variable such as “population growth rate” for multiple countries.
The second tab allows users to explore the 2 variables related to urbanization, either as a comparative choropleth or as a line plot. The line plot allows the user to select an individual country and see its variables. The choropleth shows both the urban population percentage and urban population growth rates side by side. An interesting finding is that most developed northern countries have high urban populations, but have lower urban growth rates compared to their developing counterparts. For the choropleth I chose to use grid.arrange command so that the user can visualize the difference between the urban population percentage and urban population growth rates.
The next “population” tab has the same options but for the population variables.It shows that the countries with the largest population also have the largest number of births. Population growth rates however, vary less among countries. In comparison to the urbanization choropleth they are not seen side by side.
The final tab is a comparison bubble plot of urbanization rates and population growth rates. This shows an overview of the change in global rates over time. It shows that global rates of both urbanization and population growth have decreased since 1960. It also shows an association between the population growth rate and urbanization growth rate. The bubble plot was purposely not made to show individual countries as individual country information as well as country comparisons were already shown in other visualizations. Instead, the bubble plot’s goal was to show the relationship between population urbanization and the general global trend over time.