The Battle for Baghdad - NY Times interactive graphic

Here's another New York Times graphic that provides some insight into the evolving situation.

Violence in Iraq - The Battle for Baghdad - New York Times

If you click on the Sunni Area, Shiite Area, and Green Zone labels in the upper right corner, the map will be painted with some subtle coloring that I found helpful.

The forward and back controls that that show you week by week changes did not work well for me, often not responding to my mouse clicks. The pull down menu worked better but of course is a lot more clumsy. A PLAY button with some speed control would have been really helpful.

The time span runs backward to February 11th so this chart doesn't allow comparisons of how post "surge" events relate to the pre "surge" situation.

More Timelines in Motion

BBC NEWS | In Depth | Baghdad: Mapping the violence

This interactive graphic from the BBC will repay your careful interactive examination.

Some things to try.

1) Drag the timeline slider slowly to see how the level of violence has changed month to month.

2) Also click on Ethnic Areas and then click back and forth between Current and Pre-2006 to see the dramatic changes in ethnic mix that have taken place already and to understand where the predominance of violence is taking place.

It will be interesting to compare the March 2007 view of violence when it is ready to the pictures of violence in December 2006, January 2007 and February 2007 to better gauge the degree to which the "surge" may be having a positive effect.

This would be even better if, like Gapminder, there were a PLAY button and some Speed control. Next Month and Previous Month buttons would also be handy as it is a little tricky dragging the timeline control exactly one month forward or back or clicking on exactly a given hash mark along the timeline of months.

Hat tip to: Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media