Afghanistan War Logs Visualization

Drew Conway, an NYU political science graduate student, has created some remarkable graphs from the enormous amount of information provided by Wikileaks on the war in Afghanistan. His latest graph focuses on the increasing scale of the war from 2004 to 2009. Wired’s Danger Room blog has a good summary of Conway’s work.

It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize.

NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool. The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on.