When talking about making a data visualization, many people picture someone at a computer working with data, graphics, and charts. Yet, the actual creation can contain a lot more work. For Óscar Corvera , an Infographic Artist for La Prensa Gráfica , his approach is journalistic and described in the Life of a Graphic . When an early morning shooting left several dead in San Salvador, El Salvador, Corvera went to the site to interview witnesses and police officers as well as sketch the scene.

He records everything including the location of other cars and trees. He then laid the crime out, step by step, and coordinated it with the version from the article. After the initial data visualization, Corvera continued his research, gaining access to the car where the people were shot. He counted bullet holes and locations, also including the positions of occupants. The resulting data visualization led his editors to assign a reporter to do a follow-up article. The second graphic received an Award of Excellence from the Society of News Design.

Periscopic , a data visualization tool firm, created A World of Terror to explore the extent of terrorism around the world. Data was compiled from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Global Terrorism Database (GTD) records ranging from 1970 to 2013. The interactive data visualization tool allows users to view 25 terrorist groups’ actions by five categories including longest active, recent activity, most victims, geographic spread and by the name of the group. The reader can also choose incidents that have been verified for the 25 groups or see all the incidents credited to a group even if not verified by authorities.

By hovering over a group, the reader will see the numbers of incidents that group has been involved with as well as the total number wounded or killed as a result of those incidents. The data visualization tool also includes a chart which represents the number of incidents and when they occurred as well as how many were killed or wounded. A map located above the chart allows the viewer to see which countries the acts of terrorism took place. By clicking on the map, readers can review a brief background of the group.

Al-Qa’ida and Taliban are two of twenty five groups listed in A World of Terror interactive data visualization tool.

The data analytics are summarized in a Sources and Methods link in the bottom left of the page. A brief analysis of the data is broken into the geography, years, wounded, and killed on the bottom right. Basically, the analysis states that the 25 groups selected out of 3,065 listed in the GTD are responsible for 48 % of the wounded and 56% of those killed in terrorist attacks in 73 countries.

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Do crime activities vary throughout day and night? Are there more robberies and assaults during a day or a night? Answers to these questions can be found on this online data visualization developed by Trulia . The authors, Joe Golike and Sha Hwang, charted 25 large US cities on an interactive visual data analytics report named “When does crime happen?”. Viewers can see either combined or individual hourly trend of activities for seven types of crime for all cities that are included in this data visualization. Pointing a cursor to a city brings up a hover box which shows percentage breakdown of crimes by type and hour.

Choosing a crime type from the category menu rearranges individual city charts by the prevalence percentage and highlights selected crime types. The source for the underlying data is SpotCrime.com . This report covers the period for January 1 – 31, 2011.