Overview

I had never heard about Hex before despite coming from a data background, so found this hackathon really interesting. One of my main aims when I encountered Hex and learned that it could create interesting data visualisations from simple prompts was to create a bar chart race. A bar chart race is basically a bar chart but it allows the bars to move over time, usually with the aim of highlighting the various positions of the things that are being measured. In one sense, then, they are an interesting spin on bar charts in that they add a time element to an otherwise static form of data representation.

My influence came from the YouTube channel, Data is Beautiful. You can see their YouTube channel here. They create a variety of bar chart races for things such as the biggest companies, most successful music artists and population sizes for countries.

Influenced by that channel, my aim was to create a bar chart race for the GDP for OECD countries. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and it's a measure of the total value of goods and services produced by an economy in a given time period. It is usually seen as an indication of how wealthy an economy is. The OECD stands for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and it consists of a number of countries around the world such as the United States, United Kingdom and France and, as the name suggests, they discuss economic policies of global importance.

Prompts

For the Hex platform, I merely used two prompts to get the bar chart race that I wanted. The data source for the information comes from the World Bank, which Hex was able to intelligently get with the prompts. My prompts were:

I would like to build a bar chart race for the GDP of all OECD countries from 2000 to 2022.`

and,

Amazing. Can you do another one please, but this time for 1980 to 2023?

Productivity Gain

Hex utilises agentic AI to obtain the data sources. When using Hex, it was intelligent enough to know that one potential source of data is the World Bank, something I had forgotten to include in my prompt. One strength Hex has over other LLM platforms like ChatGPT is that, at least in this case, it produces the output for you and saves it in the "File" area. It named the file the suitably named, oecd_gdp_race_1980_2023.mp4 , and within seconds I was able to see the economic fortunes of a variety of OECD economies from 1980 through to 2023.

Ordinarily, a process like this would take many hours or days to complete and it was created in a matter of a prompt or two. I can definitely see Hex being a vital tool in someone's data visualisation toolset.

Artificial Intelligence Disclaimer

This Project Story has been written entirely by a human, with no input from an Large Language Model (LLM).

Built With

• hex