For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with the religions dataset, where there are the majority of religions in the world, with the number of adherents to the religion over the years, and the percentage of the religion compared to the world population.
I decided to work with this dataset because in humanities, we are learning about the Silk Road, where one of the main culture differences and similarities between countries were religions they practiced. Religions have grown and shrunk over the course of many years, and I wanted to take a few of the years in the 20th and 21st century to see the growth and shrinking of religions.
In my visualization, the data is represented as bubbles. The bubbles represent each relgion. When you click on the bubble, it displays the religion and how many adherents of the religion it has. With the three buttons at the top (1945, 1970, and 2010), you can switch between the different religions
To interact with the visualization, try clicking a button to go to a specific year. Then click on a bubble to see which religion it is and how many followers the religion has. Scroll to the right to see more religions!
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that for all three years, Christianity had the most adherents, which was really surprising. I thought that Hinduism or Islam would have been the most followed, so it was shocking to see that they weren't
Something I still wonder about is if some of the trends I found (growth and shrinking of religions) will stay the same going into the future and beyond. Patterns like marriage between different cultures would decrease the number of both religions, as the child would be mixed. These trends and patterns will be something that I will continue to look out for outside of coding class as life goes on:)
The most challenging moment of this project was getting to make each of the circles depending on the size/followers of the religion. Afterwards, though, I found out that it was not as hard as I was making it, and through concepts I knew how to do in coding, I made it work!
If I had more time, I would like to add more years to my dataset and have an animated piece of code with a slow, medium, and fast button to go through the years with different religions and the number of adherents for each one.
My proudest moment during this project was when I got to see the final product and putting each of the years together with code. Separately, they looked very plain and normal, but putting them together was like fitting the last piece of the puzzle. Amazing!