This was a data visualization that I made in ART 388.004 with Professor Rose Marshack during the Spring 2008 semester. It was my final project in the class. I took another course with her during the Spring 2009 semester that allowed me to revisit, redo and finish this project. Download one of the files bellow to launch.
The title of the project. ISX : IBC means, Iraq Stock Exchange index of IBC (Iraqi Body Count).
This project explores the brutality of war, specifically the Iraq war. However, instead of focusing on “the troops”, I have decided to place the Iraqi civilians in the limelight. This mock stock graph and ticker actually displays data of Iraqi civilian deaths during the war. The letters that make up the abbreviations of company stocks at the bottom are actually taken from a website that lists, in varying detail, incidents in Iraq that resulted in civilian deaths. In other words, the letters make up a sentence from a short news story. The number shown is the number of people who died from the incident you are reading (the number before the period) and I added numbers after the decimal to keep the stock feel.
The Iraq War and the economy/stock market are both loaded subjects in current events. This recent stock market collapse is the direct result of greed and abuse of power. The War In Iraw was also shrouded in massive corruption surrounding Halliburton and its subsidiaries.
The data is live from the web, iraqibodycount.org, and everything you see is done with data and code. So, I did not use Photoshop or Illustrator to create the graph, no images what-so-ever. I used only the Processing environment and Java. Everything was hand coded by me and I did not copy from existing works. When loaded, this program will change in semi-real time. This includes the graph and IBC index at the top (total number of civilian deaths since the war began.) Feel free to download the source file below.