Week 10: The Forgotten Dead (Visualisation Project)

The Iraq War has been ongoing for over 7 years. Under published, under reported; thousands of missing people and uncounted family members have been statistically forgotten.

THE FORGOTTEN DEAD A representation of the Iraq war causalities and comparison between different forms of publications.

Why Visualisation?

Visualization offers a method for seeing the unseen. It enriches the process of discovery and fosters profound and unexpected insights into, in this case, unreported casualties throughout the duration of the Iraqi war.

Visualisation is the practice of mapping data to visual form. It supports notion of exploration and analysis while also visually presenting the raw data that we have collected.

Why is visualization important?

Computer systems generate and store massive and growing amounts of data. At the same time, advanced networks, distributed processing, and other developments allow unprecedented access to data. Data visualization offers one way to harness this infrastructure to find trends and correlations that can lead to important discoveries.

Representing large amounts of disparate information in a visual form often allows you to see patterns that would otherwise be buried in vast, unconnected data sets. As opposed to the traditional hypothesis-and-test method of inquiry, which relies on asking the right questions, data visualizations bring themes and ideas to the surface, where they can be easily discerned. Visualizations allow you to understand and process enormous amounts of information quickly because it is all represented in a single image or animation. Moreover, virtually any kind of data from a broad range of academic disciplines can be represented visually, making data visualization a potentially valuable approach to learning for a large number of students and researchers.

Our visualization is based off different figures found from various sources. While originally our hypothesis was predicted to show causality rates from sources like Wiki Leaks to be much higher, once the data was collected and analyzed, it actually showcased the large disparity between the casualty rates of both USA and the Iraqi forces and civilians.