VizWorld.com

It’s about that time again, the annual anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers & the Pentagon.  As part of their coverage, the New York Times has an interactive visualization of the many aspects of the financial impact, showing data varying from physical damage to war funding and homeland security budgets.

Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. What has been the cost to the United States? In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt. All figures are shown in today’s dollars.

via One 9/11 Tally: $3.3 Trillion – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

Graphics 9/11, interactive, nytimes

This week, Wikileaks published a large dataset of intercepted pager messages from the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy including messages between individuals and emergency services.  Jeff Clark took the data and analyzed various phrases for important and shares the results.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

I have taken this data and done an analysis for 100 phrases selected to summarize the events of that horrible day. I have focused on the time period from 8am until 8pm, September 11th, 2001.

He has a sparkline chart showing various phrases over the 12 hour period, with some interested prominent selections like “please call home” and “call your mother” showing up above “plane crash”.  See a world-style animated visualization after the break.

via 9/11 Pager Data Visualization.
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Science 9/11, infographic