This breaking news post may already be broken.
I came ready to do a quick-turnaround post about the new UN Arms Trade Treaty, which passed late last night. It wasn’t going to be the most complex visualisation ever, but I wanted to do big, pretty circles showing who voted for, who voted against, who abstained, and who simply couldn’t vote because they hadn’t paid their dues (here’s looking at you, Venezuela).
It’s easy enough to find out who voted for the treaty – 154 states in all, actually, though finding out which ones is proving harder than I expected.
Three states voted against – Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Who’s surprised?
Four states couldn’t vote because their dues are in arrears – those are Venezuela, Armenia, Dominican Republic, and Vietnam.
The problematic area is turning out to be the 23 mystery states who abstained. All news reports I’ve found thus far mention Russia and China as two main abstentions but then refer to the other states simply as “21 others”. Maybe they’ll mention them vaguely – “some Gulf states”, some “Latin American states”, but there hasn’t been any greater expounding on who, exactly, abstained.
This is highly problematic for my big, pretty circles, because right now, I only have one tiny circle that’s even accurate – those of the three “no” votes. The UN Press Office isn’t responding to my calls, and a call for help on Twitter has been met with not much help at all. Let’s see what I can get as the day goes on.
UPDATE:Â Okay, now I’m getting somewhere. Desperate cries for help on Twitter were answered with a pdf of the vote results from the lovely people at Amnesty UK. I can’t copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet, so I’ll be typing out 193 individual votes for a while.
Click-and-drag is the greatest Excel tool in the history of Excel tools. I created the dataset and uploaded it to Many Eyes. Here it is:
And now we’ll visualise the data. Many Eyes is essentially idiot-proof, which is good news for me because I am clueless about most things that don’t involve sociological theory or dogs. Once you have the dataset, all you have to do is click “visualize” and then pick your visualization of choice. Apparently, big, pretty circles are really known as bubble charts.
Oh no! Many Eyes won’t let me make big, pretty circles with my data as there are no numerical values attached to the countries or their votes. I’ve gone back into Excel to code my data as such: 1=Y, 2=A (abstention), 3=DV (didn’t vote), 4=N. Many Eyes already wouldn’t run in Chrome so I’m in Firefox attempting to make it work…
And now that I’ve added values, Many Eyes won’t recognize it. Until later, Internet!