In the next couple posts (part 1 and part 2), I’ll show you how I made the suitability map for this online English class.

Data is everywhere. You can download it from free sources, or you can create your own data. For this project, I will download data. I went to worldbank data website and browsed various datasets for economy, infrastructure, demographics, education. Here is a chart I made to show internet users (%) by country.

How can data be mapped? QGIS is free and open source.

QGIS is a Geographic Information System (GIS). QGIS is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) software. Let Wikipedia explain:

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software^[a] where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.^[3] 

A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data.

So basically, QGIS is a free software used to make maps.

Butt you can do a lot with it. You can make maps of any data which includes spatial information. For example, you can map economic growth, demographics, infrastructure, education and many others. Maps can answer where questions for many industries. Below are some statistical indicators and maps created in QGIS.

Economy and Growth

Travel Services: Travel services (% of commercial service exports) covers goods and services acquired from an economy by travelers in that economy for their own use during visits of less than one year for business or personal purposes. Travel services include the goods and services consumed by travelers, such as lodging and meals and transport (within the economy visited).

survey mean consumption or income per capita: Mean consumption or income per capita (2017 PPP $ per day) of the bottom 40%, used in calculating the growth rate in the welfare aggregate of the bottom 40% of the population in the income distribution in a country.

textiles and clothing: Value added in manufacturing is the sum of gross output less the value of intermediate inputs used in production for industries classified in ISIC major division D. Textiles and clothing correspond to ISIC divisions 17-19.

GDP per capita: GDP per capita is gross domestic product divided by midyear population. 

GDP : GDP at purchaser’s prices is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products.

Demographics

population ages 0-14 (% of population): Population between the ages 0 to 14 as a percentage of the total population. Population is based on the de facto definition of population.

population density: Population density is a measure of the intensity of land-use, and can be calculated for a block, city, county, state, country, continent or the entire world. 

Percent of population in urban areas: Urban Area Refers to a village equivalent administrative area which satisfies certain criteria in terms of population density, percentage of agricultural households, and a number of urban facilities such as roads, formal education facilities, public health services, etc.

Urban population living in areas where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total population): This indicator is useful for identifying countries most vulnerable to the effect of rising sea levels due to climate change.

employment in agriculture: Sectoral information is particularly useful in identifying broad shifts in employment and stages of development. In the textbook case of economic development, labour flows from agriculture and other labour-intensive primary activities to industry and finally to the services sector; in the process, workers migrate from rural to urban areas. 

fertility rate, total: Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death and disability among women of reproductive age in developing countries.

Population Growth: Annual population growth rate. 

Infrastructure

Mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100 people): Access to telecommunications.

Education

Educational attainment, at least Bachelor’s or equivalent, population 25+, total (%) (cumulative): A relative high concentration of the adult population in a given level of education reflects the capacity of the educational system in the corresponding level of education. Educational attainment is closely related to the skills and competencies of a country’s population, and could be seen as a proxy of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the stock of human capital.

pupil-teacher ratio: The pupil-teacher ratio is often used to compare the quality of schooling across countries, but it is often weakly related to student learning and quality of education.

Analysis in QGIS

I want to bring in more students from other places. I need to know what cities of the world would be suitable locations to advertise. I need to compare characteristics that make Danang

I selected the indicators economy and mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people to find countries that have:

• prohibitive cost of one-on-one for most
• high number of people with smartphones and access to internet

I clipped the overlaying features of the two layers to make this map. The dark orange colored countries are those which have a developing or emerging economy and a mobile phone subscription rate more than 95%.

What’s next

We’re not yet done with this map. I broke it up into two posts. In the next post I’ll add another layer to the map and make a list of cities to advertise in.