Terrorism in Europe 1867-2017. Initial Experiments with the Data
Screenshot of the Tableau Dashboard. Available [ here ] and at the end of this post. In the aftermath of the attacks at the Manchester Arena in May 2017 and at London Bridge the following month, I felt that I wanted to take a closer look at data relating to terrorist attacks across Europe. At a purely personal level, my hope was to discern patterns and provide a broader context for my own understanding. In searching for a suitable data asset, I encountered the Terrorism in Europe Wikipedia page. The data doesn’t attempt to cover every incident, limiting itself to those where 10 or more people (including the perpetrators) died. It also consciously defines actions by State actors as beyond the definition of terrorism – a nuance lost on some critics of both the dashboard and the underlying data. The Data One chief attraction from the point of view of creating a visualisation is that the data in the Wiki article was relatively clean and needed relatively little tweaking to m...