The Iraq War by the Numbers: Extracting the Conflicts’ Staggering Costs

624246174001_5021696153001_5021209282001-vsOne of our fellows recently had a piece published about her very unique and timely capstone project. The original piece is posted on Data Driven Journalism

In her own words:

This war is not only important due to its staggering costs (both human and financial) but also on account of its publicly available and well-documented daily records from 2004 to 2010.

These documents provide a very high spatial and temporal resolution view of the conflict. For example, I extracted from these government memos the number of violent events per day in each county. Then, using latent factor analysis techniques, e.g. non-negative matrix factorization, I was able to cluster the top three principal war zones. Interestingly these principal conflict zones were areas populated by the three main ethno-religious groups in Iraq.

You can watch her explain it herself:

 

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