This project is our final assignment for the EDAV (STATW5702) course at Columbia University. Read the complete report here.

This project was an endeavor to see what we could uncover about colonization with data. We recognized early on that the nature of this subject meant it requires extensive historical work to contextualize data visualizations. Although we lacked deep historical knowledge on the subject, we hoped to use data to explore the impact of colonization, and potentially find trends and relationships that could be interesting.

The questions that intrigued us included:

• What is the relationship between colonization and the current economic/social health of a country?
• What can we discover about the economic impact of colonialism overtime?
• What patterns can we find regarding the way in which countries' experienced colonialism (level of economic transformation, violence of independence, etc.)?

Answering these questions proved to be very challenging. Particularly difficult obstacles included dealing with vasts amounts of missing data, and concerns regarding the accuracy of data in the time periods we were interested in. As a result, we were hesitant to make any claims based on our visualizations. However we hope that this analysis could provide starting points for relationships that may be interesting to look at more closely. Although we are not in any way historians, we found thinking about the challenges of working with historical data fascinating, and feel that this project is an interesting forray into applying data visualization techniques within the social sciences/humanities.