Worldmapper: Fantastic resource for bringing stats to life
I stumbled across the Worldmapper project by accident and my first thoughts were “Wow! Brilliant for World Sociology”. Actually I suspect it will be useful for a wide range of things throughout sociology including poverty, gender and religion.
The key idea is to represent statistics on a range of topics in the form of a map, so that countries and regions change size according to the statistics - so for example for statistics of people living on less that $1 a day the US and Western Europe are tiny but Africa is relatively large. It is a very powerful visual way to display international comparisons and brings the statistics to life, making them easier to understand at a glance.
As well as viewing the maps online you can also download them as PDFs as well as the graphs and data that have been used to create them, meaning that as well as having a powerful overview of the statistics you can also look more in depth at different countries.
The project is ongoing so new maps will be added over time.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before