Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo.
The New York Times points us to an interesting visualization of the Wikileaks War Logs made with R by Mike Deward at the August bit.ly hackathon in NYC.
The intensity of the heatmap represents the number of events logged. The color range is from 0 to 60+ events over a one-month window. We cap the color range at 60 events so that low intensity activity involving just a handful of events can be seen — in lots of cases there are many more than 60 events in one particular region. The heatmap is constructed for every day in the period from 2004-2009, and the movie runs at 10 days per second.
The orange lines represent the major roads in Afghanistan, and the black outlines are the individual administrative regions.
The source for the visualization is available online, and the visualization itself does a good job at showing the “hotspots” in the region and how they’ve spread from the eastern edges further inland, presumably as US forces penetrated further into the region.
via Visualizing the Wikileaks War Logs – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.
