Map: Every call Obama has made to a foreign leader in 2014 by Max Fisher.
From the post:
What foreign leaders has Obama spoken to this year? Reddit user nyshtick combed through official White House press releases to make this map showing every phone call Obama has made in 2014 to another head of state or head of government. The results are revealing, a great little window into the year in American foreign policy so far:
It’s a visual so you need to visit Max’s post to see the resulting world map.
I think you will be surprised.
There is another lesson lurking in the post.
The analysis did not require big data, distributed GPU compuations or category theory.
What it did require was:
- An interesting question: “What foreign leaders has Obama spoken to this year?”
- A likely data set: press releases
- A user willing to dig through the data and to create a visualization.
Writing as much to myself as to anyone:
Don’t overlook smallish data with simple visualizations. (If you goal is impact and not the technology you used.)