A geospatial visualization on 10 years of global terrorism
Today I looked into the state of terrorism, in order to understand the trends in attack types and targets.
The Global Terrorism Database dataset contains countries, attack types, targets, terrorist organisations and weapon types. To analyze this dataset I first used geospatial visualization to obtain an overview, then bar charts to get the aggregate ranking, and finally bump charts to view the trends.
South Asia and Middle East are among the most attacked regions
What stood out from the map are the hot spots in places like South Asia, Middle East and Northwest of South America, which we don’t often hear about in the news with heavy coverage on Europe and US.
Three most attacked countries are all in the middle east.
Zooming into Europe where there are many reported attacks in recent years revealed Ukraine received the most attacks.
Bombing and armed assault have been the primary types of terrorist attack
The number of attacks grew drastically since mid 2011. Kidnapping has overtaken assassination since 2013.
Civilians and private property are the most attacked
Private citizens and property have long been the primary target, followed by military, policy and government.
Majority of attacks involve explosives and firearms
In terms of weapon used in the attack, explosives (especially projectiles, vehicle and grenade) and firearms have been the two major groups.
What I learnt today is how to use cartoDB for geospatial visualization, an area I want to improve. By using multiple data layers, one can mash together several datasets.
This is #day16 of my #100dayprojects on data science and visual storytelling. Thanks for reading and welcome to send me ideas and suggestions.
