THE SHADOWOF TERRORBIJOY RAVEENDRANINFORMATION & INTERFACE DESIGN

JULY 26 2013 | NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DESIGN

• 30 years of every terrorist incident from 1970 – 2011 (200K records)

• Retrieved from the Global Terrorism DB

• Date of attack, place of attack, group name, target, casualities, weapons used, damages, motive, descriprion

• Supplementary information from Wikipedia

DATASETDATASET

• ‘Exploratory’ more than ‘explanatory’

• Data is in the form of events – so have a timeline and plot it on a map

• No story at the moment – so emphasize on the numbers and threat level

• Gather supplementary information from Wikipedia

CONSIDERATIONSCONSIDERATIONS

INITIAL ITERATIONSITERATION

• Markers on map can be represented as explosions (or the color of fire)

• Use opacity to show overlapping layers or use ‘no-overlap’ (ruled out later)

• Make the map borderless , add more negative space around content, so emphasis goes to subject matter

• Tree maps a better option over bar charts forsummary data

CONSIDERATIONS (contd.)CONSIDERATIONS

• Scaled down dataset (30 years to 7 years)

• Removed unused data columns

• Removed ‘invalids’

0 or unknown month/day/year Unknown city/state/country 0 casualities/wounded and 0/unknown

damages

SANITIZING DATASANITIZING DATA

• Used Google’s ‘Geo’ API to geo-tag locations

• Pivot tables based on ‘terrorist organizations’, ‘country of attack’, and ‘mode of attack’ columns.

• Formula to calculate severity of attack based on following data:

Number of people killed Number of people wounded Estimated damage to property

ENRICHING DATAENRICHING DATA

Severity = ( dead_index * 10 + wounded_index * 7.5 + damage_index * 2.5 )

ENRICHING DATA (contd.)

Dead_Index0-40 : 140-80 : 280-120 : 3120-160 : 4160 – 200 : 5

Wound_Index0-75 : 175-150 : 2150-225 : 3225-300 : 4>300: 5

Damage_Index<1million : 11m – 1b : 2>1b :

3

ENRICHING DATA

• Excel for data/business logic• TileMill for map creation• MapBox for map hosting• Google Docs for geo-coding• Google Visualization API to generate

tree-maps• HTML/Javascript for layout

For proposed future use : • MapBox.js/Wax for custom

tooltips/legend• Flash for intro screen

TOOLSTOOLS

SEE VISUALIZATION NOW!Goto visualization

• ‘Invalids’ may be incidents of high severity

• TileMill rejects non geo-coded locations – skews the numbers

• Geo-coding API is not entirely accurate – combination of city/country not yielding better results. May have to manually encode.

SOURCES OF ERRORERRORS

• All deaths are considered the same – shouldn’t assassinations be considered to be of higher priority?

• Large data shown as “############”

• If ‘others’ occurs in any of the top 10 visualizations, it has been ignored

SOURCES OF ERRORERRORS

• Incorporate complete data set

• Complete other sections

• Include opening sequence to set up the story

• Adding animation to map markers will help emphasize more on numbers

FUTURE PLANSFUTURE PLANS

FUTURE PLANSFUTURE PLANS

• Link tooltip to related news article (probably for high severity incidents)

• Remove top 5 countries from tree-map. Have a choroplethic view on country wise impact instead.

• Include – ‘Your country has XX% chance of being attacked’

• Use different color marker to represent zero casuality attacks

• Match-ups

THANK YOU

JULY 26 2013 | NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DESIGN