Robert Lipinski

Spotify - what Poland listends to?

The visualizations shows popularity of episodes of the top 20 podcasts in Poland, on a weekly basis. Y-axis represents ranking of each podcast among the top daily 200 episodes and x-axis represents weeks, starting from Oct-2025. The more days per week episodes of a given podcast spend on each place in the ranking, the warmer the color gets

> A few very top podcasts have all their episodes in the first 20/30 daily episodes every single week. 
> Other top podcasts fare less consistently
> Many episodes are high in the ranking for a single day only (likely the release day)

Coverage: Top 200 episodes each day, from 2025-10-11, to 2026-04-19 (with missing dates between 2026-03-28 - 2026-04-19)

Data: Kaggle

Habsburg Ghosts - how?

The distribution of GDP across the former territories of the Austro-Hungary.

> west-east income largely disappeared after the fall of the Iron Curtain
> former Habsburg territories in the modern-day Ukraine are still faring somewhat worse than the rest 

Data: Kummu, Kosonen and Sayyar (2025) "Downscaled gridded global dataset for gross domestic product (GDP) per capita PPP over 1990–2022". Scientific Data 12(178).

Statistics - where information and art meet

Turns out simple file download and 3 lines of code to visualize population density at local level can reveal so much about modern Europe..

> Spain is really, really empty
> Frenchmen love to live alongside rivers
> Europe's 'Blue Banana' region is also one of the most densely populated areas
> Mountain ranges can be as easily seen with population map as with elevation data

Coverage: Local Administrative Units (LAU) in Europe

Data: GISCO

What if Russia Came for you?

The plot shows in red which territories would be lost by every European nation if it suffered the same territorial losses as Ukraine did at the hands of Russia as of February 2024 (20% of national territory). The areas coloured are the ones that are the closest to the eastern-most neighboring country and collectively have a landmass that just crosses the 20% of total national territory threshold. NUTS-3 units were used as reference, apart from the countries outside the EU or where there are <40 than NUTS-3 units. In those instances local administrative units were used

Coverage: 25,256 local units across 33 countries

Data: Eurostat

1971 A Development Oddysey

Development is often compared for whole countries

But Human Development Index (HDI) is also calculated for 1,971 subnational units!

Zurich 🇨🇭 opens the ranking (at 0.989) at Middle Juba 🇸🇴 closes it (0.232)

Sadly, only 20/592 African regions outrank the last EU region in 🇧🇬

Measure: Human Development Index (HDI), ranging from 0 (least developed) to 1 (most developed)

Coverage: 1,971 sub-national regions of the world

Data: Global Data Lab

Shadow from the East

In 2023 countries closer to Russia spend noticeably more of their GDP on defence. Contrary to some sceptics view this isn't driven by some irrational fear or prejudice against Moscow. The correlation between defence spending and distance to Moscow only starts being visibly correlated since 2014 - the year Ukraine was first attacked. The rising defence spending in countries close to Russia is therefore a logical reaction to the ever more real military threat

Measure: Defence spending across EU countries (% GDP) vs proximity to Moscow (000s km) by year

Coverage: 27 EU member states (given data availability)

Data: European Defence Agency; Zizka et al. (2019) "Coordinate Cleaner: standardized cleaning of  occurrence records from biological collection databases"

Idea sparked by The Economist (09/01/2025) article "Europe could be torn apart by new divisions", which compared those two measures for 2023 alone

Independence days

When do countries celebrate their independence? When put on a clock-like calendar it turns out that most countries do so in the 2nd part of the year, most often in July, August and September. In turn, very few countries commemorate their freedom in months of January and April. And when do you celebrate your independence?

Measure: Number of national independence day in a month

Coverage: 193 UN member states

Data: Wikipedia (supported by national sources if needed

Here you can learn more about American 4th of July - some lesser known traditions

And here to learn more about independence days in some less talked-about countries

The violence suffocating Ecuador

In recent years Ecuador has been in global news headlines mostly for 'wrong' reasons, in particular the spike in violence. The plot documents the relative size of that bloody trend. The apparent simplicity of those numbers conceals thousands of personal tragedies and destroyed lives...

Measure: Year-to-year change in homicide rate per 100,000 male population

Coverage: Latin American countries

Data: United Nations Office of Drug and Crime

You can learn some more about the recent violence in Ecuador here