Graphing refugees in African countries
Antonio Tamez Elizondo Fatemeh SamaeiTehrani
Population displacement in Africa. Through the years, the presence of war in Africa, followed by famines, genocide and political instability has brought forth a major displacement of people throughout the continent. While some of them flee en masse to other countries in Europe, many of them stay as pariahs in their own countries, living in refugee camps and provisional tent cities. We researched the numbers of these refugees in several African countries, along with the number of these refugees that are being assisted by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/03/2050091.htm
Finding the numbers The search for these numbers led us to a website called “blatantworld.com”, a collection of numbers and general humanities data compiled from different sources, including UN databases.
We compiled the numbers into an excel Sheet divided in three fields: Country’s name; Number of Refugees; Number of Refugees assisted by the UNHCR
blatantworld.com. Referenced from http://www.unhcr.org/4c11f0be9.html
Writing the code Having obtained the data, we designed the grasshopper code. Graphically, what we intended to do was to represent the number of refugees with extruded circles, while the UN assisted ones with extruded stars, both of them overlaid on countries.
Opening commands of the code; shows the general data of different African countries. The first values represent the number of refugees, the second value the number of those refugees that are assisted by the UN
The data was compiled for 36 African countries.
The code then is subdivided in two parts so that the countries can be sorted in two orders. The first order is that of overall refugees.
Both the countries’ names and the numbers (in this case the overall refugees) are isolated so that they can be independently graphed from the UN numbers.
The isolated figures are used with a range of numbers so as to obtain the heights of the graphs. The circles that represent the refugees are fed into the curves component.
The very same steps are repeated for the refugees assisted by the UNHCR
The complete code.