Food democracy: foodstuffs according to their democratic value

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Update: we won the competition!

This is a contribution to Memefest 21013 Food Democracy competition in collaboration with Miha Mazzini. Food democracy generally means more involved citizen participation in food production and supply chain, but here we have a different take on the topic. In Miha’s words, taken from the project form:

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Brain has developed as an organ to help us fill the stomach. A lonely stomach hunting and gathering in the savannah has less chance to survive than a group of them, so the societies have developed.

So, the content of the stomachs must mirror the structure of the society – what are the preferred foods for authoritarian regimes and what for democracies?

We took all of the recipes from Food.com and democracy indexes of The Economist and Wikipedia; we linked national cooking recipes with the countries, split recipes into ingredients and added democracy indexes to them.

What kind of communication approach do you use?
Spoof scientific report on real data.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

To see have very sweet life in democracy really is.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

Person should choose their restaurant even more carefully than the country.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

It’s fun getting some food for thought.

Launch the interactive visualization.

Food democracy network
Food democracy network

More details below.

Main idea:
To range foodstuffs according to their democratic value, if such exists.

Data sources:
Allrecipes.com and food.com were crawled and structured information (ingredients, national provenience, …) extracted from individual recipe pages (~150,000 of them).
Economist Intelligence Unit for democracy indices of individual countries.

Construction:
A network (graph in math parlance) was constructed such that each recipe’s country was associated with one of four main nodes, which represent four democracy groups: authoritarian (0-2.5 on EIU scale), poor (2.5 – 5 on EIU scale), good (5 – 7.5 on EIU scale) and democratic (7.5 – 10 on EIU scale). Then the recipe ingredients were connected to one of these groups. Finally, ForceAtlas2 algorithm was run on the network, producing the result you see in the visualization.

Tools:
Java for crawling the net and original graph construction, Gephi for graph processing and original visualization, sigma.js for web presentation.

Authors:
Miha Mazzini (concept), Marko Plahuta (concept and programming / visualization / web presentation)

What we really found:
That the freshest, most unprocessed food is apparently very undemocratic, which is a side effect of poor countries usually not having a democratic form of government.

Social network diagrams of Slovenian governments between 1991 and 2013

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Such a young country, but already so messed up. One is inclined to think that all is lost, and one would not be far from the truth. Much ink has already been spilled on sad state of affairs in Slovenia, its fall from grace in European Union, the precipitous decline of living standard of its citizenry and its bleak outlook for the future. Did I mention the rampant corruption of its ruling class and top managers? Best not. This was, after all, supposed to be the next Switzerland.

Blaming the ruling class in mere abstract terms may give one a fleeting satisfaction, but who were the people who led us off the cliff? Someone did govern here, or was at least giving an appearance of governing. Prime ministers are known: Lojze Peterle, Janez Drnovšek, Tone Rop, Andrej Bajuk, Janez Janša, Borut Pahor and currently Alenka Bratušek. These are the main culprits for the downward spiral, of which one can only hope we already passed the first half. Names of their accomplices – the ministers, secretaries, etc. – have a tendency to drift into oblivion, as majority of people preoccupy themselves with the daily grind.

So who were they and how are they connected? Here’s a diagram showing all the government members  from 2001 on. I call it “loyalty diagram”, since it was constructed in a way that it shows who is close to whom, and who is hardly loyal to any alliance. The rationale in short is:

  • Ministers are considered to be very loyal to the prime minister (although I know they are not).
  • Secretaries a lot less, since they are essentially experts and not politicians.
  • Secretaries are less loyal to ministers as are ministers to prime minister, but still a lot, since it’s they who appoint them.
  • Secretaries are loyal to each other, since they are bureaucrats who like their positions and will in theory support each other, although in practice there exist many party rivalries.

Click the link or image below to launch the interactive diagram, which can be searched, panned, and zoomed, and which shows details for every staff member on the government. Red dots are prime ministers, bright blue ministers, dark blue secretaries. Every person is marked with a color of the highest position occupied.

Launch the interactive loyalty diagram

Social network of staff in Slovenian governments 2001-2013
Social network of staff in Slovenian governments 2001-2013

A few lines of commentary:

  • There are a select few of loyal party cadres that every prime minister carries with him, or her, which very rarely, if at all, work with anyone else. These are the dark blue and bright blue dots in close proximity of red dots (prime ministers).
  • Node radius is proportional to how many times the individual sat in a government over the years. For example, Janez Janša was not only prime minister twice, he also served in other capacities, most notably as Minister of Defense in 1994 and was taking on  more and more departmental duties as his government in 2012 slowly disintegrated.
  • There is a big cluster of common cadres between Janez Drnovšek’s and Anton Rop’s governments. It seems that a lot of secretaries are passed on into the next mandate, except in case of shift between left- and right-wing governments, which perform a purge on inauguration.
  • Anton Rop had most secretaries and the biggest government. If anything, the governments are getting slimmer with time.
  • People in the middle of diagram are generally dragged there because of many ties with different prime ministers and ministers, so they are either the most politically promiscuous, or (theoretically) the best experts in their fields, a theory swiftly disproven considering they took on ministerial duties in vastly different departments. These are the most die-hard bureaucrats who mostly didn’t do much else in life except being politicians. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there are exceptions even between them.

Here is how the social network of government actors evolved over time:

Growth of social network of Slovenian government members 2001-2013 from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

 

Next diagram shows connections of same cadres to their respective fields of work. Green dots are government offices, other colors are the same as in diagram above. Here one can see, for example:

  • Who is walking in corridors of true power: prime ministers like to keep close Department of Defence, Department of Finance and Department of Internal Affairs. People close to these offices are the movers and shakers.
  • How different the governments of Slovenia truly were: departments were clumped together with other departments over time, split and again clumped with other departments. There’s hardly a department which survived this period without being split or clumped, most notably Department of Defense.
  • Who held which functions, and how are different departments connected with various people.

Launch the interactive diagram of employment by government office

Social network of members and government offices in Slovenian governments 2001-2013
Social network of members and government offices in Slovenian governments 2001-2013

Here is a short video of how all this evolved over time:

Growth of Slovenian government members and ministries 2001-2013 from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

 

Data sources

All data was kindly provided by Government of Republic of Slovenia. Download CSV version here. If anyone wants original documents, e-mail me. My address is on About page.

Technology

Graphs were constructed in Java and exported to Gephi for visualization, then again exported to web-friendly sigma.js format.

Correction: it’s actually from 1991 to 2013.

Corruption visualized: Global Corruption Barometer 2013 on world map

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Interactive map of data from Global Corruption Barometer 2013 (Transparency report), showing corruption levels per country for political parties, educational sector, private companies, media, civil servants, judicial and medical institutions, military, NGOs, parliament, police and religious institutions.

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Global Corruption Barometer 2013 on interactive world map
Global Corruption Barometer 2013 on interactive world map

Made with TileMill, data: Transparency International.