demonCoreData

Screenshot of the Tableau Dashboard. Available [ here ] and at the end of this post. I recently wrote about my initial experiments in visualising data relating to terrorist attacks . My conclusions were that although the dashboard accurately portrayed the underlying data, I needed a better datasource to provide more detail and a broader context. After a bit of digging, I found a series of Wikipedia pages that attempt to collate all known terrorist attacks across the globe on a month by month basis. This data runs from the present time back to January 2015 [ 2015 , 2016 , & 2017 ]. Before this, Wikipedia has data available for the period from 2010-2014 broken into 6-month blocks and data from 1970-2009 is available in whole year pages. I’ve elected to restrict my choice of data to the period from 2015 onwards for a number of reasons. A brief perusal of the earlier data confirmed that while it was richer and more detailed than what I had used previously, it was still not full...

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...