1. THE SHADOW
OF TERROR
BIJOY RAVEENDRAN
INFORMATION & INTERFACE DESIGN
JULY 26 2013 | NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DESIGN

2. • 30 years of every terrorist incident from 1970 –
2011 (200K records)
• Retrieved from the Global Terrorism DB
• Date of attack, place of attack, group
name, target, casualities, weapons
used, damages, motive, descriprion
• Supplementary information from Wikipedia
DATASETDATASET

3. • „Exploratory‟ more than „explanatory‟
• Data is in the form of events – so have a
timeline and plot it on a map
• No story at the moment – so emphasize on the
numbers and threat level
• Gather supplementary information from
Wikipedia
CONSIDERATIONSCONSIDERATIONS

4. INITIAL ITERATIONSITERATION

5. • Markers on map can be represented as
explosions (or the color of fire)
• Use opacity to show overlapping layers or use
„no-overlap‟ (ruled out later)
• Make the map borderless , add more negative
space around content, so emphasis goes to
subject matter
• Tree maps a better option over bar charts for
summary data
CONSIDERATIONS (contd.)CONSIDERATIONS

6. • Scaled down dataset (30 years to 7 years)
• Removed unused data columns
• Removed „invalids‟
 0 or unknown month/day/year
 Unknown city/state/country
 0 casualities/wounded and 0/unknown
damages
SANITIZING DATASANITIZING DATA

7. • Used Google‟s „Geo‟ API to geo-tag locations
• Pivot tables based on „terrorist
organizations‟, „country of attack‟, and „mode of
attack‟ columns.
• Formula to calculate severity of attack based
on following data:
 Number of people killed
 Number of people wounded
 Estimated damage to property
ENRICHING DATAENRICHING DATA

8. Severity
= ( dead_index * 10 +
wounded_index * 7.5 +
damage_index * 2.5 )
ENRICHING DATA (contd.)
Dead_Index
0-40 : 1
40-80 : 2
80-120 : 3
120-160 : 4
160 – 200 : 5
Wound_Index
0-75 : 1
75-150 : 2
150-225 : 3
225-300 : 4
>300: 5
Damage_Index
<1million : 1
1m – 1b : 2
>1b : 3
ENRICHING DATA

9. • Excel for data/business logic
• TileMill for map creation
• MapBox for map hosting
• Google Docs for geo-coding
• Google Visualization API to generate tree-
maps
• HTML/Javascript for layout
For proposed future use :
• MapBox.js/Wax for custom tooltips/legend
• Flash for intro screen
TOOLSTOOLS

10. SEE VISUALIZATION NOW!
Goto visualization

11. • „Invalids‟ may be incidents of high severity
• TileMill rejects non geo-coded locations –
skews the numbers
• Geo-coding API is not entirely accurate –
combination of city/country not yielding
better results. May have to manually
encode.
SOURCES OF ERRORERRORS

12. • All deaths are considered the same –
shouldn‟t assassinations be considered to
be of higher priority?
• Large data shown as “############”
• If „others‟ occurs in any of the top 10
visualizations, it has been ignored
SOURCES OF ERRORERRORS

13. • Incorporate complete data set
• Complete other sections
• Include opening sequence to set up the
story
• Adding animation to map markers will help
emphasize more on numbers
FUTURE PLANSFUTURE PLANS

14. FUTURE PLANSFUTURE PLANS
• Link tooltip to related news article (probably
for high severity incidents)
• Remove top 5 countries from tree-map.
Have a choroplethic view on country wise
impact instead.
• Include – „Your country has XX% chance of
being attacked‟
• Use different color marker to represent
zero casuality attacks
• Match-ups

15. THANK YOU
JULY 26 2013 | NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DESIGN