Nice To Meet You by Elena Paunova

In Nice to Meet You, we visualize measures of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity across 250 countries and territories in the world. We intuitively understand that what language we are born speaking, what religion we follow, and the color of our skin predetermine a very significant part of our lives and who we are. The goal is to use this intuition to learn more about different societies via these proxy variables and test if the complexity of each country correlates with its economic outcomes, political system, geographic location, religion, or level of moral freedom.

We further employ a clustering algorithm and create a taxonomy that organizes the countries in our world by their shared complexity (heterogeneity vs homogeneity). As a result, a new world emerges, one in which our closest neighbors are not the ones sharing our borders but countries located thousands of miles away. The combined analysis and visualizations lead us to the conclusion that there is ultimately more that binds us than divides us.