Data & Stuff

Data has been released (leaked) to Wikileaks, which contains information regarding engagements that have occured during the Afghan war. I’ve produced a visualisation, showing which of these engagements involved a friendly/civilian/enemy being killed in action [KIA]

These make up a smaller proportion of the data than one first might expect, but are still significant [other incidents may involve arrests, IED detection, engagements that didn't result in a KIA].

This is a map of Afghanistan, showing the regions the incidents occured (by colour), the size of the mark denotes the scale of the KIA count, whilst the shape of the mark shows who the attack was on.

Take a look at it ‘full screen’ for more ease of use, hovering over individual points will give you some details, as well as the fact you can filter by how many people were killed in the incident, and filter down to what type of incident.

Some other more detailed analysis was conducted by the Guardian (amongst others), who had pre-release access to the data. Further information on the data can be found on Wikileaks – Afgham War Diary. This visualisation was created using Tableau Desktop, and published to Tableau Public.

A lot of people are aware of what Twitter is like as a service, but what do we know about how it looks like internally? Apart from the fact that it has a nice plush office

I’ve always been interested in ‘Where Twitter Might Go’ – both from their infrastructure, staffing and the future products/services they may be rolling out. Thanks to Twitter opening up a job site, we can get a picture as to what they are planning to do in the future.

The obvious is regarding monetisation, it’s taken a while but there are now ‘official’ rumours that some form of an ‘ad platform’ will be launched at SXSWi next month where Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO will be one of the Keynote speakers.

This is backed up, by the fact they are actively recruiting for product marketing, and software engineers to work on monetisation.

What’s more interesting, to me, is the other jobs on offer. Especially regarding data analysts, and data visualisation. Just recently Twitter mentioned that the twittersphere are tweeting at a rate of 50,000 times a day.

That’s a lot of data being put out there, a lot of opportunity for text semantics, trend analysis, and harvesting the information. Which makes sense for Twitter to be after data analysts etc. Though the fact they are actively moving into the visualisation market is interesting. Below is a visual they made at the time of the Superbowl, tracking both mentions of the Superbowl, and contextual analysis around the brands being mentioned.

To me, the combination of their active recruitment in these two areas is an indicator that they may be releasing in the future, a tool that allows for the contextual and semantic analysis of Your Brand, they are slowly rolling out corporate tools (like being able to say who a Tweet was attributed to without having to use ^NH etc)

Who knows what the future might look like, I’ve got my ideas, and got my own side projects!

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