*Unhappy thoughts means some combination of foreign aid, immigration and refugees, civil war and guerrilla warfare, terrorism, “war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity” (all one category), famine, drought, or AIDS.

Over the whole period, this collection of negative topics averaged 28% of total articles on the continent.

Again, the tagging system that the Times uses is opaque, the tags are vague, and most importantly, it seems like a lot of articles with “Africa” as the location tag lack desciptive tags (like “famine” or “ponies”). In short, be skeptical of the graph’s validity.

The graph above shows some of data mentioned here broken down by year. As I mentioned the last time I used these stats, articles tagged “Africa” are on the continent and do not include articles on individual countries within Africa. If you are comparing this graph to the one on Somalia keep in mind that the scale of both axes has changed.

Lee at Roving Bandit (probably the best economics blog in Southern Sudan) pointed me to this wonderful heat map of population density in Africa. Click the picture to see maps from other decades going back to 1960.

I went to  DC’s Eastern Market today and stumbled upon this map of Africa from 1875 (just a few years before the scramble). I don’t know much about it, other than the date and that it was printed in the US (at the bottom the longitude is given relative to Washington) by Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co. Sorry that the scan is blurry on the sides, my little all-in-one scanner can’t fit the page and I don’t want to bend it.

Click the map for a larger version.