Video Showing Where in the World Jehovah's Witnesses Have been Active, 1926-2016

by ILoveTTATT2 7 Replies latest jw friends

  • ILoveTTATT2
    ILoveTTATT2

    After many, many days of learning how to write macros in Excel and cleaning up a lot of data, I finally have the desired result: A timeline of where Jehovah's Witnesses have been active since 1926.

    There are some notes:

    1) "Korea" was assumed to be both North and South Korea up until 1950. (I chose 1950 because that is the same year Russia and other communist countries went "banned").

    2) Morocco and Western Sahara are considered as one.

    3) In the years previous to 1947, I had to read the yearbook reports and make an educated guess as to whether I should include in the report or not. My requirements were: Not banned, report was for an entire year if there was more than one witness in the land, reports were official and not second hand. This disqualified many places, so that in 1943 there were very, very few places in the world where Jehovah's Witnesses freely preached.

    That being said:

    Here's the video:

    https://youtu.be/A5KvUVWR_vI

    At first it loops through the entire years very quickly, then gives you 2 seconds per year to examine.

    Enjoy!

    When I achieve getting all of the YB data into Excel, there will be other maps like these!

  • Splash
    Splash

    Very interesting, thanks for the hard work!

    I hope you will share the excel once you're done as well, this could be the basis for many such analyses.

  • RodrigoGuerreiro
    RodrigoGuerreiro

    Good work

  • ILoveTTATT2
    ILoveTTATT2
    I hope you will share the excel once you're done as well, this could be the basis for many such analyses.
    Most definitely! The Excel sheet for country names is already up! Find it HERE.
  • OrphanCrow
    OrphanCrow

    That is an interesting video, ILoveTTATT.

    I noticed that Canada disappeared from the active status during the war years when the JWs were under ban. That big red country became invisible for a few years. The same thing happens with several other countries - there are African countries that appear and then disappear.

    It appears like this map reflects where the JWs were legally able to have a presence, rather than where they were actually "active". This map reflects the political presence of JWs around the world, not necessarily their active status per se.

  • ILoveTTATT2
    ILoveTTATT2
    It appears like this map reflects where the JWs were legally able to have a presence, rather than where they were actually "active".
    That is correct. I should change the video title to reflect that. Essentially it includes places where there was a full report for the year and places where the witnesses had legal presence.
  • OrphanCrow
    OrphanCrow
    Essentially it includes places where there was a full report for the year and places where the witnesses had legal presence

    Yes. That is a critical distinction.

    This video is valuable in that it highlights how the WTS has had (or not) political positioning across the world. As much as the org presents itself as a "religion", its political presence has significance

  • dropoffyourkeylee
    dropoffyourkeylee

    For me it is more striking just to watch the countries without legal presence (gray areas). In the last frame, the band of Muslim countries across northern Africa is interesting

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