The Hidden Cost of War rupa dasGupta Data Visualization as Generative Narrative February 9, 2010

Original Idea: Out of Sight, Out of Mind Objective: To map the frequency of articles mentioning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in relation to the number of American casualties in those two conflicts and to see how these three spectrums fluctuate over time.

Objective: To map the frequency of articles mentioning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the number of American casualties in comparison to coverage of the economic downturn in the United States. The hidden costs of war

Does the data show a relationship between the wars overseas and the current recession? Is the decrease in media coverage of the conflicts related to increasing coverage of the recession? Is the decrease in media coverage of the conflicts closely tied to decreases in monthly casualty rates? questions

People following the war/economy closely and interested in the links between them People NOT following either topic who would hopefully find the data interesting enough to start paying more attention Target audience

Previous project

Precedents: what happened to us?

Precedents: iraq body count website

Precedents: lie by lie

Precedents: a year in iraq

Seemingly endless interesting angles/data sets to work with –Enlistment data –Murder rates in US cities vs. deaths in Baghdad –Cause of death (suicide, accident, friendly fire, etc.) –Monthly costs of war –Unemployment rates –And on and on… Process / challenges

-Datasets were on vastly different scales -How to give equal relevance to each -How to show overview of each dataset -How to ‘dig down’ into each dataset Process / challenges