religions across the years

For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a dataset from the World Religion project, counting the amount of people who followed each religion in each country from 1950 to 2010.

I decided to work with this dataset because we were recently learning about many of these religions in class, and I wanted to learn more. I was also curious how those numbers changed over the years.

In my visualization, the data is represented as dots at the latitude and longitude of the country they represent. The brighter the color of the dot, the higher percentage of people in that country follow that religion.

To interact with the visualization, try:

•  Zooming in or out with mouse

• Tapping keys 1 through 9 to see different religions

• Hovering over dots to see the percentage of people who follow said religion

• Clicking the space bar to move forwards in time

One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that in most of the countries selected, christianity is either dominant (80%+) or extremely low. I also noticed that many countries, especially early on, didn't seem to survey for certain religions, even common ones like Buddhism or Islam.

Something I still wonder about is how many of those aforementioned unsurveyed people there were, and whether they were catalogued under "other religions" or not counted at all.

The most challenging moment of this project was deciding which portions of the data to include. The data set had almost 20 different religions, as well as the subgroups of each one. The sheer amount of data was intimidating, and it was hard to choose which religions I thought should be included.

If I had more time, I would include every single country, not just the 10 I chose. It would have been interesting to see which religions dominated in which areas and how it changed over timel

My proudest moment during this project was when I managed to code in all of the different years in half a class (up to that point, I only had included data from 1950).