Visualizing Repository Activity

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am updating the lessons learned paper, and would like to include histograms showing how many people have contributed how often to our lessons. More specifically, I have 9 data sets (one for each lesson), ranging in size from 5 to 16 records, in which each record shows a number of commits and how many people have committed that often. For example, the data for our SQL lesson is:

num_contributions,num_contributors
1,8
2,8
3,2
4,3
6,3
8,2
10,1
25,1
28,1
30,1
106,1

meaning eight people contributed once, eight contributed twice, and one contributed 106 times. What's the best way to visualize this, given the spread of values on the X axis? And what's the easiest way to generate that visualization in Python? (You can get the data here to try out your ideas.)