userman12/internet-adoption-map

Internet Adoption Map is an interactive data visualization that shows thirty years of the world coming online, from 1990 to 2024, country by country. Pressing play animates a timelapse of internet penetration alongside historical milestones like the release of the Mosaic browser, the iPhone, and the COVID pandemic, so you can see how real world events lined up with when people actually got online. One of its central findings, as stated in the README, is that wealthier countries adopted the internet fastest, while some middle income countries connected a small elite quickly and then stalled for a decade before wider adoption caught up. The map can be viewed as a flat projection, a draggable three dimensional globe, or a Gapminder style scatter chart plotting any two of twelve metrics against each other, with bubble size showing population. Eleven different data layers are available, covering things like mobile and broadband subscriptions per 100 people, the price of mobile data, internet shutdowns since 2016, and gender parity in internet use. Clicking any country opens a detail panel with its full history, and a compare mode lets you overlay two to four countries on one chart. A submarine cable overlay shows over six hundred real undersea cables appearing on the map as they went into service. Every meaningful view, including the exact year, layer, and selected countries, is encoded into the page's URL so any state can be shared as a link. Under the hood it is plain JavaScript using D3 with no build step, and its underlying data files are generated by Python scripts pulling from sources like Our World in Data, the World Bank, Ookla, and TeleGeography. A GitHub Action reruns this pipeline automatically on the first of every month, refusing to commit if a source's data looks broken, so the live site at userman12.github.io stays current without manual updates.