Corners of foreign fields: Visualising the human cost of the Great War (1914-1918)
For this project, I wanted to see how I could use the mapping functionality within Tableau to visualise the battle sites and casualties of World War I. As my primary data source, I’ve used the Wikipedia article List of military engagements of World War I , and references therein. The article is quite good, and provides a structured list of Fronts, Theatres, and Campaigns, with individual battles and actions listed within these sections. I wanted to see if I could extract the baseline data from the text and reconfigure it into a more visual entity, with a degree of interactivity that would allow the user to create their own visualisations , based on all or subsets of the data. [Can't wait to explore the data? Scroll to the end of the post, or go direct to my Tableau page: here ] Within each action, I have gone to the appropriate Wikipedia Page and extracted the following information: Front/Campaign; Action; date (start & end); the location (converted to decimal Latit...