This visualization is created for the course Information Visualization of the University of Amsterdam. The assignment was to visualize a dataset in an interactive way, using the knowledge of the lectures.
The team consisted of the following members:
For this visualization the dataset of the Violations Documentation Center(VDC) in Syria was used, which they published here. This NGO records of all human rights violations within Syria. The VDC adopts its methodology in accordance with International Humanitarian Law, Human Rights Law, and the 4 Geneva Conventions. To ensure correctness of the data, the VDC has three stages in which it documents violations. Firstly, they gather information on the ground from survivors, hospitals, cemeteries and certain media centers. Secondly, videos, images and other documents of the victim are gathered and inspected by a team of local specialists. Lastly, the data is inputted in the database and regularly checked by people on the ground.
The data of the VDC is adjusted, as their data shows individuals and the information of their death. Our team chose to show the numbers of the entire story, and thus aggregated data in order to achieve this goal.
With the goal of juxtaposing the tragic Syrian civil war with the world-wide attention it has received ever since the start of the war in 2011, we use news coverage of the events in Syria as a proxy.
For this part of the visualization, we make use of the GDELT 1.0 Event Database made available by the GDELT Project - a novel effort that tries to document all geo-political and social events occurring globally by tracking news sources. The data from the GDELT Databases was accessed using Google BigQuery. Our team filtered the results to return the counts of events which concerned Syria (both in aggregate terms, as well as sorted by event types ), and had a negative tone. Further, in order to depict the trends in media sensitivity towards the Syrian crisis we also retrieve the number of news sources which published regarding these events worldwide.