World Potus by Accurat, Google News Lab

Who would the rest of the world vote for? A data-driven digital experience visualizing “soft” and “human” data to discover the world’s interest in the 2016 US presidential candidates.

By looking at searches for each candidate and how they differ in each country, WorldPOTUS shows real-time worldwide variations in searches — and which region is interested in each of the major election issues. The topics — Abortion, Black Lives Matter, Brexit, Economy, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Gun Control, Healthcare, ISIS, Oil, Racism, Refugees, Same Sex Marriage, TPP — are selected based on the top issues of the campaign as decided by their ranking in Google search on average in 2016. But, why these wobbly bubbles? Shouldn’t data visualization always be rigorous and precise? The Google Trends Index is a valuable and insightful way to gauge the general sense of a country’s interest in a topic over time, but it shouldn't be considered a perfect and ultimate measure of it. Opinions on such delicate topics are often a fluid and ever-changing blob and, for this reason, Accurat worked on a “softer” depiction of data, in a way, that faithfully renders the fluidity and fuzziness of conversations around the world – a deliberately imperfect visual to grasp and display a meaningful and rich, but very human, dataset.