This visualization is a digital interactive timeline detailing every single drone-strike-related death in Pakistan from 2004 to now. This visualization is considered as an exploration of the attacks as the visualization tries to demonstrate the USA’s inability to target hostels with this technology rather than acknowledging what happened. This visualization’s target audience is likely people who support the USA’s counter-terrorism actions, as this visualization would give them insight into how inefficient America’s approach is. (Photo by taken by Agence France Presse in 2015)
The primary sources for this visualization are cited on the info page. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is the primary source, it can be trusted as a reputable source. As for the New America Foundation, I was disappointed to find that the website had taken their article down, also New America Foundation puts out a lot of reactive news making it an untrustworthy source. Although Living Under Drones sets the narrative for this visualization the majority of the citations used in this piece are from news articles and interviews, not data sets. As for Bing API, it is simply a search tool. For this visualization to be as impressive as it is, it is disappointing to see a lack of effort put into thorough research and citation.
After reading Chapter 3 of Meirelles’ Design for Information I was happy to see that this visualization meets most of the original conventions for a timeline. It demonstrates the amount of time passed in a linear fashion, it uses time indicators to let the audience know when certain events happened, it uses line indicators to let people know the number of deaths per year, and it uses colour code as a way to describe data (Mierelles, 2013, 95). I would also say that this visualization does a good job depicting time, as time is abstract and difficult to visualize. I believe that this visualization does well with spreading the message of human rights in a context that allows viewers to humanize those affected seriously.
This visualization has taught me that digital visualizations can be more multi-faceted because of the ability to make multiple pages in one infographic.
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