lithium flowers bloom » Military Intervention

US Intervention 1798 – 2009

L.J — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:35:17 +0000

“The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to ‘protectorates’ such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers.” (via A BRIEFING ON THE HISTORY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS, By Zoltán Grossman, October 2001)

People might be familiar with recent US military interventions in Middle East, or those in Asia in 1970s, however in the past 200 years’ history, overseas interventions actually happened a lot more frequent than people usually think and played an important role to this country’s development.

This visualization is not intended to create a narrative piece of intervention history, it’s more created as a tool to go through the mass amount of history events and discover the correlations among those events in a certain period of time, or within a certain region.

DOWNLOAD

Download app for mac:

http://leejayxia.com/processing/us_intervention_mono_present.zip

For 1024 x 768:

http://leejayxia.com/processing/us_intervention_mono_present_1024.zip

I’m still working on the source data since world wars are currently excluded. Download links will be updated when I finish.

More experiments with globe

L.J — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:51:11 +0000

Some sketches to play with 3D globe and its motion. I have to made this to see if it makes sense at all if I plot the timeline data long the radius of the globe. Next step is to create better visual elements and put in text captions.

The graph reads from the center to the outside as from oldest to latest events. The size of the cubes indicates the length of the intervention event.

Download the sketch executable for Mac OS X.

update on mainstreaming info

L.J — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:48:21 +0000

I broadened my mainstreaming info project to look into all US military interventions in the past 200 years instead of only nation building attempts for several reasons.

After putting all nation building facts together and categorizing them by countries, it’s still hard for me to reveal some significant patterns among all these attempts for me to use as an axis to organize all the verbal materials;

I made the sketch below trying to plot the history events onto the timeline. It turns out that first it would take much longer time for me to verify all the facts and second I don’t feel confident enough to simply “tag” the history events with my shallow understandings for now;

Sketch: military intervention shown on top of the timeline bar, main history events displayed along the side of the bar. (blue – independence, red – controlled by another country, orange – dictatorship)

This timeline graph is not enough to carry the huge amount of information due to the capacity of information it’s trying to carry. It’s not easy to arrive on a simple conclusion from this sea of history data. A visualization is always an illusion, however I do not wish to over simplify the history in this case. I would have to put more texts and labels on the screen. (This is like a common struggle while I’m designing a visualization. It’s becoming more like a data mining toolset other than a complete presentation of an idea.)
So the user still have to read through the texts to get more info on a certain event, which is not a bad thing. They could combine the external intervention facts together with country key events to get to their own conclusions, or not. From there I started to think if it would be better to just show the big picture of all military interventions and use nation building as an addition.

The intervention list I’m using was found here: http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/interventions.htm. History commons has another well organized list of intervention history too. I wrote a quick gantt chart sketch in processing to see how the data look like, and was surprised to find China and Nicaragua to be the two countries with most US intervention in history.

Next step would be playing back the events in a 3D space to better illustrate the geo location of all these data, and I would like to create more organic visual forms for the history events. Some experiments starting with basic geometry forms: