Dynamic Visualization of Economic Indicators

Data visualization tools can take existing statistics and re-express them in ways that facilitate interpretation by a variety of audiences ranging from the sophisticated “power user” to the novice. Because these tools can expand a program’s audience dramatically, it is vital to develop tools that “tell the complete story,” for example, including measures of reliability along with point estimates. This report presents the ongoing efforts at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop and implement a standard set of data visualization tools for usage with its e monthly and quarterly economic indicators. We present two different types of data visualization tools: one that presents a “snapshot” of all indicators at a given point in time and another that presents dynamic interpretations of the time-series data for a specified indicator (totals and change estimates).