This was one of my most ambitious projects, analyzing global inequality using the World Inequality Database curated by Thomas Piketty and colleagues. The dataset spans decades, and I focused on data from the 1980s to the present to ensure broad country coverage.
At first, I thought the project would be straightforward: time-series data, indicators like the Gini coefficient, and country comparisons. But I quickly learned that inequality data is conceptually complex. Unlike natural disaster data, where numbers are factual, inequality measures are aggregated, estimated, and defined differently across contexts. This required me not just to analyze but to study economic theory, reading works like Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and other contemporary sources.
Working with my collaborator Patrick, we built the project using Layer Cake, a framework combining Svelte and D3.js. The story was presented in a scrollytelling format: first, multiple line charts showing Gini coefficients, with interactive highlighting of countries, continents, or groups. Then, a second section compared the top 10% vs. the bottom 50%, using two lines to illustrate the widening or narrowing gap.
Technically, the project required preprocessing and aggregating multiple datasets into a usable form. I also designed a creative introduction, pairing contrasting photographs to illustrate inequality visually.