A World of War

Another day, another data visualization.

I loved my data visualization class and professor (Bianca DiPietro) so much last semester, that I took another class with her!

This project began with the intention to explore circular graphs. I was drawn to the form, and typically lean toward expressing timeline data and I wanted to use the opportunity to combine the two. Though circles aren’t the typical choice for timelines (horizontal or vertical lines are), I wanted to attempt to make them work together, or at least understand why they don’t work in the process (I do consider this exercise a failed experiment). There was a long drawn-out trial and error process where I picked a visualization and forced a data set to fit it, without really understanding the type of data set it was. I eventually learned that In representing timelines, data could be recurrent, nonrecurrent, or mixed, and the type of data, and what you want to get out of that data, affected the type of timeline shape.

On picking my data set/ theme, I had to think about what people wanted to know about wars. (Note: The data set I put together might not be the most accurate it was brought together from multiple sources. Data set accuracy was not the purpose of this assignment.)

When - they want to know when a particular war took place.
What - they want to know what happened in a particular year, eg 1999?
Who - they know who participated in a particular war.
Compare - in which they want to know the timing or characteristics of one war relative to another.

While I initially tried to incorporate all of this within the same diagram, it became overcomplicated and unreadable. I had to balance the number of data points and so decided to prioritize the When and Compare, in this case, the war dates, durations, and the number of deaths, which are visible at a glance on the diagram.

I wanted to create a visualization that on a macro level conveyed what it was about — war. The form itself allowed to depict violence and thus set the narrative. For similar reasons, I kept the color scheme monochrome and style minimal. The form of the concentric circles essentially works similar to a spiral with the oldest event being closest to the center and each event having an entire band to itself. The intention of the visualization is more for an explorative lookup than an instantaneous one. On further discovery, one can co-relate the years or numbers associated with each band with the list of wars below. The list provides war names as well as countries involved, and once again reiterates the number of deaths through a colored band on the side.

Overall I found that circular timelines are easy on the eyes and have the potential to be strong visual markers. I like how they can help to condense information in comparison to linear timelines which are very expansive. I see this visualization in the form of a large poster or digital display. I do believe that it has better potential to be an interactive visualization and hope to explore that further.