Friday, September 21, 2012

Religious restrictions index: how do countries compare?

The Guardian DataBlog published yesterday an interesting article exploring graphically the religious intolerance across the world. The data are coming from a report published by Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life. I like the philosophy DataBlog a lot, providing the raw data for everyone to look at.
However, I felt that the visualization could be improved. First the data are longitudinal and no temporal representation is provided. So I downloaded the Google Spreadsheet and worked it in R with googleVis. googleVis is the R API to the Google graphic library.
The data are composed of two data type:

  • The Government Restriction Index (GSI) [measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs or practices]
  • The Social Hostilities Index (SHI) [measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals,organizations and social groups]

The R code is the following:

I like it better to explore those data. Select a country of interest and follow it.