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:
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