Here is another image I made with processing (and pixelmator). The x-axis is population density. The y-axis is GDP per capita. The bottom left holds the low values. The colour of each circle is determined by the country’s Polity IV score (democracy score). Blue is more democratic and red is more authoritarian. The size of each circle is determined by the size of the country’s population.
The inlay blows up the chaos of the bottom left corner and scales down the radius of the circles to improve visibility. The sizes and placement of the circles within the inlay are correct relative to each other.
Click the image to download the much larger version (2000x2000 px).
I recently started playing around with Processing and this is the result of my first experiment. I wanted to generate a picture that would show general trends in 4 variables across many countries in an intuitive way. I looked at 43 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
The variable selection (this time) was almost random. The x-axis is the number average number of children in a family in 2003. It ranges from 2 to 8. The y-axis is the total amount of ODA in 2003, ranging from 10 million to 5 billion. The colour is tied to the Polity IV scores for each country: blue is more democratic, red is less. Finally, the size of the circle is the population size. Nigeria is the huge circle. A few countries were too small to show up and labels were not generated for them.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the circle all alone at the top. Its ODA in 2003 was apparently 5 billion. That seems way too big to me, but debt forgiveness (and other things you may not think of as aid) are included in ODA. Still, its placement may be due to an error in the data set.
Click the picture to get a higher quality version of the picture. Kottke made the font. I would love suggestions or criticism. I will post the code after I clean it up.
