After pasting, select the “Text toColumns” option in the “Data” menu and separate the text via each “comma” into separate columns. (If you’d like to import these into your excel sheet, insert a blank row, then paste this list into the first cell. Report Key,Date,Type,Category,Tracking Number,Title,Summary,Region,Attack On,Complex Attack,Reporting Unit,Unit Name,Type of Unit,Friendly WIA,Friendly KIA,Host nation WIA,Host nation KIA,Civilian WIA,Civilian KIA,Enemy WIA,Enemy KIA,Enemy Detained,MGRS,Latitude,Longitude,Originator Group,Updated by Group,Ccir,Sigact,Affiliation,D Color,Classification Using a site like this, we can deduce that the columns correspond to the following fields (in. From this site we can look at individual events, such as the event connected to the string above, to get the categories of information: One site I’ve found particularly helpful is here. Luckily, this dataset has been uploaded and published in a variety of different places, so simply copying a string from one of the more arcane cells, such as the first cell (“D92871CA-D217-4124-B8FB-89B9A2CFFCB4“), and then Googling that string will often lead you to a site that documents the war logs. First of all, the columns have no titles, and this lack of documentation/metadata makes some of the entries unintelligible on first glance. So go ahead and download an archiver, and then use it to extract the. Mac users may need to ensure that the compressed filename ends in. Ez7z seems to be the preferred archiver for the Mac user. Mac users will have to use a different program, as the 7-zip file archiver is only built for windows. Windows users can use the 7-zip site to download their own file archiver. You will need to download special software to extract data from this. It is a compressed file format much like a. If you take this step, you may skip Step 2.īut wait, the file you just downloaded isn’t a. This should lead to your downloading the entire dataset in a. Note: If for some reason these sites are down and you’re having problems accessing the dataset, try using this public Google Fusion Table, “Wikileaks Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010.” First click on the link and then click on File / Export via the menu at the top left. This should be the second option listed in the list at the bottom of the page. Go to the page, and then download the data in. The main page for the Afghan War Diary in the wiki is here: The Afghan War Diary data, however, is usually accessible via the page, which currently serves as the wiki of Wikileaks. Given how often the main Wikileaks site (and how often most of the many mirrored versions of the Wikileaks site are also down), getting the data is sometimes the most difficult step. Choose the download option "All entries, CSV format".In the second part, we will import the dataset you produce here into Google Fusion tables and then visualize it as a Google map. Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part tutorial. This type of work is not glamorous, and can sometimes be rather mind-numbing, but the cleaning and contextualizing of datasets is essential work for any data-heavy visualization. This tutorial demonstrates how to download, decompress, parse, and clean Wikileaks data with an eye towards using the data in other web applications. Indeed, although flashy interactive maps and other online applications get a great deal of press, over 80% of the work involved in creating these data-driven applications involves cleaning and parsing the data informing the application so that it can be understood by both computers and users. These releases have also demonstrated that datasets must be clean and contextualized if they are to be properly understood. In releasing information this way, Wikileaks has altered the way the general public can access and understand news reports by making available the sources that many of the major news outlets have been using to drive their coverage. Over the past year, Wikileaks’ release of large troves of classified documents, reports, cables, and other information has demonstrated the increasing importance of data-driven journalism, a form of journalism in which large datasets are filtered and analyzed to produce new stories and infographics, a many of which have a geospatial bent. 7z file archiver for ( Windows) or ( Mac) and Microsoft Excel. 25 September 2011 Cleaning Wikileaks Data for Use in Google Mapping Applications (Part 1 of 2)
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