The Geography of Violence
DataSphere is a pet project which crawls news RSS feeds, geolocates them and presents them with some simple mapping tools. It also has some basic pattern matching which allows for the visualization of articles on the map that match certain terms. The images below show some visualizations in which the distribution of articles about certain locations is displayed. The height of each pin and the size of the head indicates the number of posts. The colour of the pin head indicates the ratio of messages matching a certain set of terms to the total number of posts. The terms that are being matched are:
"bomb", "bombs", "bombing", "missile", "missiles", "explosion", "explosions", "explode", "explodes", "exploding", "rocket", "rockets", "kill", "killing", "killed"
The more read a pin, the higher the ratio of news articles there are that mention one or more of these terms. Those pins that are green have no such messages.
What is interesting about this distribution is not just the collection of violent articles around the middle-east, but also the the other areas of the globe which contain such articles. Below is another view which contains country boundaries.
Some issues with the methodology: there is no language filtering, so articles describing violence in non-English languages will not be detected; each article is located at all the locations mentioned and detected in the text.
What about the USA?
I wonder if you just look for the term "murder" what result you will get - though I think I know the answer :)
Posted by: Nicolas Kübler | August 09, 2006 at 03:04 AM