Visualizing the war deaths in Afghanistan

Open map

Niraj Chokshi took the WikiLeaks data from Afghanistan and filtered it to produce some maps. It's always tough to build visualizations on a deadline, and so there were some issues with the initial graphs, but they presented the data in a useful and interesting way. Niraj made the underlying data he'd used available as a spreadsheet, so with almost no changes I was able to upload it into OpenHeatMap to produce some different views.

It was pretty sobering to be handling data covering hundreds of people's deaths, and I'm honestly not sure what story the data is telling us. Just looking at the location and magnitude of the enemy dead in 2004 compared to 2009 shows how much the battlefield has changed though, from a handful of hotspots along the Pakistan border to a dense ring around the whole country.

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