Hello, and welcome to the DATAINT, in which I will publish my personal research at the intersection of open source intelligence, web/data scraping, data analysis, and good old-fashioned national security policy analysis. My first posts will focus on some novel analysis I’ve been doing of the Offshore Leaks Database using Python, but I plan to expand into nonproliferation and national security analysis in the future.
In the course of my analysis I will write a lot of Python code, which I will host on my GitHub in the interest of transparency and wanting to learn. I strongly believe that any data analysis should be accompanied by the code used to create it, so others can (a) learn, and (b) check it for mistakes. Not that you asked, but I think this should be standard practice at all journalism outlets that use data-analysis and visualization in their work.
But enough about me. Let’s move onto my first post, which is an initial shape-of-the-data analysis of bearer financial instruments in the Offshore Leaks Database. I hope to make it more exciting than it sounds.
