How to Create Time Series Data GIFs

Overview

The International Energy Organization (IEA) provides policy recommendations, analysis and data on the entire global energy sector, including monthly energy statistics. These datasets include monthly electricity production and trade data for all OECD member countries and electricity production data for a selection of other economies. We are going to dive into these statistics to produce insights and explore how to animate this data over time.

Getting Started

Import your data into Julius. The AI can read data in multiple formats, including CSV, Excel, and Google Sheets, among others. Once your data is uploaded, Julius will automatically assess and understand the nature of the data.

Once your data is successfully imported, you can start your conversation with Julius.

Diving into the data

Before we begin visualizing the data, we will do some exploratory analysis. Breaking out the top 5 countries by proportion of renewable energy production gives us an insight into which countries are most sustainable.

Visualizing and animating our data

Let's first look plot the nuclear energy production of Germany, which has been in the headlines recently for closing its nuclear power plants.

Now, let's animate this over time. Once you have generated your time-series chart, simply ask Julius:

“Animate this chart over time”

Let's try this again with coal production over time. First, we will generate a static chart of the top 10 coal energy producing countries over time.

The United States' coal energy production has been on the decline since before 2015. On the other hand, China is by far the largest producer of coal energy, and is still rapidly ramping up production. Let's see how this looks as an animated chart.

Animating your time-series charts helps to captivate your audiences and communicate trends in the data.