As most readers probably know by now, Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ leader, has gone ahead with the release of 391,832 secret documents related to the war in Iraq. These documents cover most of the period between May 2004 and March 2009.
The information was released in three forms, the “Diary Dig,” the “Warlogs” and bittorrent download in CSV and SQL formats.
The “Diary Dig” allows the user to search the materials, as well as browse by topic, including type of incident and region. The Warlogs site allows you to make your own “analysis” of the incident as well as voting on whether the Warlogs people should “investigate further.”
An interesting element of last July’s Wikileaks release of Afghani war documents was the use of data visualization by independent parties to make the vast amount of data apprehensible.
With the data so new, the only visualization that has been done so far has been by one the news organizations that Wikileaks gave the database to prior to public release, the Guardian. The graphic is titled “Wikileaks Iraq war logs: every death mapped.”
It’s worth a look, though it is also important to look at the follow-up piece to this map, “Wikileaks Iraq: what’s wrong with the data?” (Hint: it provides an incomplete, therefore possibly misleading picture of the war.)
If you know of, or have done, additional data visualization on this material, please let us know, either in the comments or via email. We would like to keep covering that aspect of the data and how it’s used.
