I just came accross this amazing animation, which depicts lending flows from Kiva lenders to Kiva borrowers in the field. I have been working on a few pieces of research with my colleague Jon de Quidt using Kiva data. However, that work has stalled a bit as prioritization moved it towards the end of the queue. However, this animization is indeed inspiring and it is somewhat awaking the urge in me, not to wait too long to continue work on Kiva.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.

On another note, I am going to try to do some more work with R on mapping data, trying out several packages:

• http://crantastic.org/packages/RgoogleMaps
• http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/maps/index.html
• http://crantastic.org/packages/RgoogleMaps

I found working with ArcGIS way too clumsy…