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United Nations voting data project

Started 3 years ago by femion / 8 posts

  1. femion
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Hey guys,

    I got into visualization as a hobby with some data from a quantum physics lab at my university.

    My dad is the chair of a poli sci department, his research is in international relations. I took the data he collected on the United Nations General Assembly voting sessions and made a visualization out of it. When it's finished, I'm going to send it to the printers and give it to him for his birthday.

    Here's my draft: http://www.flickr.com/photos/milankie/2783234622/

    I'm not really a 'design' person, so I'd appreciate any advice you'd be willing to give me on improving the legends/guides/titles.

  2. hadley
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    Looks interesting! Would you mind sharing a bit more about the underlying data?

    One design idea would be to try giving countries with similar patterns similar colours. You might also want to try skewing time a little so there's a bit more going on in the outer areas.

  3. femion
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    The data is a giant matrix of numbers, where each column is a voting session and each row is a country. It was painstakingly collected from the UN archive.

    Right now I'm using colour to represent physical location... ie., all the African countries are red, Europe is green, Asia is blue, etc.

  4. hadley
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    What do the numbers represent? i.e. what are the values in that matrix? And I didn't pick up on the colours being organised by continent - maybe you could organise the list of country names by continent too?

  5. femion
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    the numbers are codes for how each country voted - ie. 0 for no, 1 for yes, 2 for abstain, etc. Sorry, should have been clearer about that. My dad does some sort of statistical analysis on it, I could try to find you a research paper. Is there anything else you'd like to know about the data?

    hmm... organizing by continent might be a good idea, but would also take a lot of work because of the sloppy way I've conducted this project.

  6. femion
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    oh, also, if it wasn't obvious from the guide on the graphic, the value of the vote codes determine which direction the lines follow. Yes makes them tightly spiral around the centre, No makes them move away slightly from the centre at an angle, and abstaining or being absent makes them go directly out from the centre. My hypothesis at the beginning of this project was that there would be many countries that sort of "swarm" around the centre while many other countries that simply refuse to take part in a vote, putting them further away from the centre. Countries that are frequently absent also loose prominence by fading away.

  7. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 3 years ago #

    such a nice gift for your dad. i'm sure he'll appreciate it no matter what :) it's looking good though.

    i second hadley's suggestion for the continent breakdown. maybe color each country by its continent. What do the colors represent now? and one small change is i'd move the "eye" of the spiral up a bit so that it's centered in between the top title and top of where the country names begin just to even out the busy spots and the black spots. That's of course a matter of taste though. I also try to avoid drop shadows on text.

  8. femion
    Member
    Posted 3 years ago #

    right now they countries are coloured by the continents, see my above post.


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