For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with World Religions 1945-2010, a data set with a breadth of interesting information, including (but not limited to) individual adherence rates for each country, total adherence over time, and unique data over time for over 30 different major religions.
I wanted to create a visualization that would allow users to better understand how religion increased or decreased across the world as time went on– showing growth of adherents in each state measured every five years.
In my visualization, the data is represented as dots locked to the latitude/longitude of each country. These dots grow larger and pinker the more religious adherents are in an area (by percentage.)
To interact with the visualization, try clicking or hovering over a dot to see specifics, or clicking in general to advance time.
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that not only is there a 90% or higher adherence rate for the average country, but that percentage can increase to be over 100% (the result of one person counting themselves as part of multiple religions). This surprised me, as I had not realized just how pervasive religion is– I certainly live in an unusual and sheltered area with a high concentration of Atheists and Agnostics.
Something I still wonder about is what would this data look like is you could also filter through viewing different religions– it could be an interesting way of increasing granularity.