The goals of this assignment were to map drone strike data on the typical cartographic map and on a data display that wasn’t a map. Since both of these skills I had basically zero experience with I decided to aim for the skills that would best arm me for future projects: leaflet and D3.js

I selected the drone strikes for my visualizations because I basically knew nothing about the data except for the fact that there was a significant increase in drone strikes following President Obama’s inauguration and that a lot of these drone strikes caused innocent deaths, especially on children. For the non-map visualization I choose to use the Bar Graph because it would allow me to compare and contrast drone strikes amongst various countries.

The two visualizations act as supplements towards each other. When you first look at the map you see that, “Oh wow, we have only been targeting 3 specific countries”, namely:  Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Then, when you look at the bar graph visualization you see that these strikes aren’t all happening at the same time, which is interesting because it gives insight as to when the U.S. was taking actions against these 3 countries.

Although the media talks about drone strikes in the middle east as one ongoing tumultuous series of events, the data shows that clearly the strikes should be analyzed individually: country by country.

The visualizations are on my github website:

Drone Strikes map: http://zariahoward.github.io/basemap/index.html

Drone Strikes interactive chart: http://zariahoward.github.io/bargraph.html

So likewise the link to the code is: https://github.com/ZariaHoward/zariahoward.github.io