Environmental Scan

The field of data visualization is vast. Encouragingly so. Overwhelmingly so. As a result, this section will not attempt to summarize the entire field, but will instead offer a few select visualizations that represent nodes in the conceptualization of this project.

A World of Terror: Exploring the Reach, Frequency and Impact of Terrorism Around the World

A World of Terror visualizes information gleaned from the Global Terrorism Database with an emphasis on twenty-five high-profile organizations responsible for many of these crimes. For each organization, a two pronged bar chart visualizes the number of their attacks across time as well as the number of wounded and killed persons as a result of those attacks. When a user first lands on the site, a blank world map is visible above a timeline slider, and beneath both of those a box details how to read the site’s visualizations. To the right of this, all twenty-five groups are listed in rows of five, each with a miniaturization of their chart. Hovering over one of these miniaturizations loads a summary box that briefly describes that group. Clicking on a miniaturization causes the chart to load at a more readable size on the left-hand side of the page. It also causes the world map to become shaded in regions where the group was active. This allows the user to quickly see the geographic spread of the organization, at least as far as its physical violence is concerned. Additionally, the timeline slider located beneath the world map, allows the user to change the period being viewed in both the selected chart and all of the miniaturizations at once. This allows one to compare the relative activity levels of all twenty-five organizations at any given period within the timeline.

Analysis: By presenting all twenty-five organizations individually on a single page and all simultaneously tied to the timeline slider, A World of Terror facilitates a comparative analysis of the physical violence wrought by each organization. Likewise, the two-pronged bar chart format is successful at quickly communicating the severity of each attack. At the same time, these visualizations beg questions of audience and ideological influence. That is, the world map ties each organization’s geographic spread to its attacks, which may not necessarily be identical to the geographic spread of its ideology. That is, if the strength of an organization’s ideological hold on different regions were represented alongside the data on where they attacked, a user could begin to ask questions about who the primary audience is for any given incident. When a terrorist organization attacks a given locale it is not necessarily the case that the victims are themselves the primary audience. It could be that they are just the occasion by which a message is sent to a different community. To be clear, this is not a criticism of A World of Terror, so much as acknowledgement of the limits of the data available in its source. There is a real risk in Terror and Aesthetics that its insistence on performative meaning may obscure the ability to view its data comparatively. A World of Terror presses the importance of maintaining that ability.

The Fallen of World War II

The Fallen of World War II uses both interactive charts that allow one to compare national death tallies across time, and a narrated video that features black and white photographs from the war, contextualization via comparison to similar events occurring before and after, and the charts themselves, which are shown to evolve as the tallies are made. Together these features contribute to an incredibly impactful experience that humanizes a subject that is increasingly both too far removed and too often represented to effectively parse.

Analysis: Two particular strengths of The Fallen of World War II are its use of stacks of colored human silhouettes to form the bars of its charts and its animation of the tally itself. In the former case, the use of these images immediately humanizes numbers that are too large and too long past to effectively make sense of otherwise. In the latter case, where static visualizations present their counts post-process as fully-formed deliverables, The Fallen’s choice to include the viewer in the tabulation is deeply engrossing while also contributing to a felt sense of scale. Returning to Terror and Aesthetics, The Fallen of World War II exemplifies the utility of incorporating temporal transformation, and possibly also human figures.

Poppy Field

Marking the 100th anniversary of WWI, Poppy Fields opens with four screens giving information on the war, such as start and end dates and total battle deaths, and explaining the use of poppies to commemorate it. It then opens onto an interactive timeline that uses poppies to represent conflicts occurring between 1900 and 2014. The size of the flower itself is correlated to casualties of that conflict and the length of its stem is correlated to the length of the conflict via both its height relative to the y-axis and its length across the x-axis from the conflict’s start date to its end date. When one hovers over a given flower, the conflict’s name appears, and when one clicks on that flower, additional information is given including the actual number of fatalities, location, participants and a link to source data.

Analysis: Poppies have a haunting appearance and as the site itself states, their color resembles blood. For this reason and because of their rhetorical connection to “the war to end all wars,” their use was a very strong choice. There is something appropriately unsettling about a timeline populated with blood-red flowers, all the more so since flowers are generally perceived of as pretty. By combining prettiness with discomfort, Poppy Fields‘ visualization is simultaneously inviting and repellent, a combination that elicits user curiosity by virtue of being emotionally difficult to immediately parse. At the same time, by rendering all of the poppies relatively identical in terms of shape and color, any correlation between conflicts is obscured. That is to say, a user may be interested to see repeat conflict between the same participants, or conflicts between one repeated participant and various others, but this information is not immediately visible. To access it, one would have to click through individual poppies and make notes on who is participating in what conflicts with whom. Similarly, in Poppy Fields there is no real way to parse who was the aggressor in any given conflict or which side(s) sustained what proportion of casualties. Nevertheless, Poppy Fields challenges Terror and Aesthetics to use and unsettle recognizable imagery in an attempt to induce curiosity through a invitation-repulsion dyad.

Out of sight, Out of Mind

Out of Sight, Out of Mind is an animated timeline that displays casualties of drone warfare in Pakistan. Beginning in 2004, with the first recorded US drone strike in that nation, a curved line resembling a contrail falls to the chart horizon and upon impact a stacked bar appears beneath the horizon. This bar details the casualties of that strike with red for total civilian casualties, a deeper red for child casualties, white for high profile targets and grey for ‘other’ casualties. As the animation progresses across time, more curved lines fall and more bars appear on impact with each one representing an entire month’s worth of drone casualties. At the same time, a bar across the top of the page changes to reveal the changing proportion of casualties between children, total civilians, high profile targets, and ‘other.’ Once the animation stops, one can mouseover the bars for detailed information on each attack captured within. Additionally, the site provides links to news stories related to drones, as well as background information on the visualization itself.

Analysis: While one can reasonably assume that children and other civilians were not specifically targeted, by separating out high profile targets and so-called ‘other’ casualties, Out of Sight, Out of Mind visually implies that the high profile casualties are the true targets and that ‘other’ casualties are accidents in the same vein as civilian casualties. (The site itself acknowledges the vagueness of the ‘other’ category due to source vagueness and how the people included in it may be “neighbors of a target killed [or] may all be militants and a threat.”). If many or most of the people in the ‘other’ category were actually combatants and targets, lower-level ones but targets nonetheless, then the visualization simultaneously tells a story of the increasing accuracy of drone warfare, alongside the story of the drone war’s civilian casualties and periodic intensification. This potential other story undercuts the emotional impact of seeing what is an alarming number of children killed as a result of these weapons. Nonetheless, the visualization’s use of shades of red for child and total civilian casualties foregrounds them, especially against the neutralizing white and grey used for high profile and ‘other’ targets. Furthermore, the visual implication of a missile falling and data exploding into view on impact simply and directly connects the data on casualties – what could be dry numbers in a different context – to the event itself using the viscerally resonant implication of bomb falling. Together, these strengths render Out of Sight, Out of Mind successful at making a deeply abstracted war tangible by way of emotional resonance. Like Poppy Field, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, urges the value of using recognizable imagery and affect in order to efficiently convey information. Additionally, it provides a warning that an overdeveloped emphasis on emotional resonance over the details at hand risks creating a potentially undermining counter-narrative.