Over at The Guardian they’ve been busy digging through the many WikiLeaks documents (of which I must remind you it is currently against the law to own or read) and has already created several visualizations of the data within. However, they wanted something more ‘comprehensive’ that a map of locations, and decided to create a keyword-visualization which reveals some interesting ideas within the documents.
This is a picture of the 11,616 SIGACT (“significant action”) reports from December 2006. Each report is a dot, labeled by its key words. Reports with similar key words have edges drawn between them. The location of the dot has nothing to do with geography. Instead, we ran an algorithm that pulls dots with edges between them closer together. Then we labeled each cluster by the key words that are common to the reports in that cluster, and colored each report/dot by the “incident type,” as entered by military personnel. The result is an abstract map of the bloodiest month of the war.
You can read more about it here, or get the technical details and full-resolution map here.
