Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

For those who aren’t aware what cablegate is, then in brief it’s a set of diplomatic transmissions.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The Wikileaks team had performed some analysis of the data. Around where the cables had been sent from, and what classification given to them. As well as looking at what the most popular ‘tags’ for the cables were. Unfortunately their analysis that they placed on Tableau Public was removed, see here for the Tableau Statement.

This seems a bit odd, considering the analysis was at a summary and statistical level. For instance, there were X number cables sent by Y. Though not revealing the actual content of them, which is obviously in some cases secret, or classified. This is in contrast to the analysis I performed of the Wikileaks Afghanistan War Diaries. Which shows both a summary level, and further detail about the confidential files. This analysis is also hosted on Tableau Public.

So take a peak at the analysis I performed and placed on Tableau Public (the links click through to the Tableau Public versions).

Cables by Origin

Tags Used

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.