As a growing number of international NGOs are using infographics, charts and interactive maps to share success and highlight disaster, how can organisations with less resources create high quality visualisations without having to pay to outsource them?

The Guardian has put together a beginner’s guide for visualising development data.

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In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent. Article 190, Part 1 of the Soviet Criminal Code criminalized “the dissemination of the intentionally false insinuations defiling the Soviet state and social order.” The post-Stalin regime was not the sort of dictatorship that exterminated its own citizens, but it insisted that public expression be in full compliance with the Communist Party line. It was not uncommon for people to be sentenced to years in work camps for “disseminating” three or four copies of underground literature.

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