"Mapping 31 Days in Iraq"

“Mapping 31 Days in Iraq” was developed by Adriana Lins de Albuquerque, a doctoral student in political science at Columbia University, and by Adriana Cheng, a graphic designer at Mgmt. Design in Brooklyn. It is a map of more than 800 people, soldiers, security officers and civilians killed as a result of the insurgency in Iraq in January 2006. This map was created based on the data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and news reports, showing the dates, locations and circumstance of deaths for the first month of the year.

This map, although taken from 2006, is still very relevant to today’s problem in Iraq. It made me think about the thousands of bodies that have been accumulated up until now, and what this map would look like if the data had been updated with every body count up to November 2009.
I thought it was interesting the way all the people were equalized by having very similar figures so when looking at the map from afar it is difficult to depict whether they are male or female, civilian or soldier; every body is seen as one person.

This collection of data relates to other works such as Chris Jordan’s statistical portraits which gather a particular set of information and statistics and creatively graphs the information in a way which leaves the viewer with a better understanding of the situation and/or problem that is being depicted.