Presenting Data: How to Communicate Your Message Effectively

Chapter 5Data presentation on the Internet

Even though the Internet has been around for publishing statistics since the late 1990s, many still do not understand how to use the medium for the dissemination of their data and messages. This chapter explains how the Internet dissemination of statistics developed and how new developments allow a different presentation of, and communication with, data. These new presentations both allow the producer to engage users effectively and also allow the user to determine clearly what is presented. A combination of these two changes has produced a step change in the possibilities available to the user so that they may understand what is happening in data over time. Stories buried in data come to life. Further, instead of the user having to take what the producer had provided, they can now investigate relationships in data and tailor outputs to their own specification.

Many advantages derive from the Internet publishing of data but also a few disadvantages. The main advantage is ease of obtaining data on many subjects from many places from almost anywhere in the world! For users who want data from several countries on the same subject, the issues of organisation and extraction come to the fore: different dissemination programs mean the user has to learn how each works to extract the information required. In the United Kingdom, for some subjects, a user has to learn four different programs for the extraction of data for the same subject; for ...