The basic materials for a quipu are colored cords. I prepared all the cords myself, which means twisting crochet yarn to create thicker cords. Each cord is at least two-ply and one end is looped while the other is tapered and finished with a small knot. The looped end makes it possible to connect the pendant cord to the top cord in this unique way.
I prepared two quipus - one for each area. The scores per each of the 24 indicators (that are summarised to the 11 sub-indices) as well as the overall scores respectively for the total population, as well as women and men are visualized with a single string. The individual values, that are behind the calculated index are encoded at the top of the indicator strings with knots. The color as well as the thickness are relevant properties that help to visually grasp the information.
I introduced another property, which seems to have been irrelevant for the original quipus, but which is for us nowadays a common way to read data. I introduced the length of the cords as a dimension for the value of the index scores. The longer the cord, the higher the score. This way the quipu turns into an inverted bar chart. So each string carries the information of the score, encoded with the length, and the actual values encoded with the Incan way of encoding infomation via the knots. The individual indicators are summarized to an overall topic score, which is represented by thicker cords. A quipu is read from left to right. At the beginning of it is the overall summarized score for the entire country, split up by total, men and women again.
The two resulting Quipus are made of over 180 hand twisted individual cords (where the thick cords consist of multiple thiner strings).
In order to allow for comparison between countries as well as women and men, I calculated my own index using the data provided by the OECD. I normalised the data for the entire group of total, men and women, meaning using the Min and Max of all of those values in order to have comparability between the genders per indicator.
On each cord there are clusters of knots. Each cluster contains 0 to 9 knots and the clusters are seperated by spaces that distinguish one cluster from the next. The highest power is closer to the top cord. In the units position a special type of knots is used: long knots. In all other positions single knots are used. A specialty form of a knot has the 1 in the units position. It is represented by a figure eight knot, since long knots cannot be made with fewer than 2 turns.
