The New York Times’ API is really fantastic.

— Update: May 28, 2009 —

A point of comparison (requested by @theresac) is that in the same time period Canada had 10905 articles, Mexico had 10042, Germany had 10161, Norway had 1393, and Bangladesh had 900. I will soon upload the graphs of each country in Africa over time, as they show where coverage spiked. The point of the original exercise was to allow for comparisons within the continent (and to learn how to use processing), but if I find some extra time over the summer I might expand the project to the rest of the world.

— Update #2: May 28, 2009 —

Andrew Hughey pointed out that I was missing some articles from the DRC because I forgot to includes those titled Zaire. The map is now updated to reflect the additional articles.