Syria has been in the center of world attention for quite a while now, and not exactly for the merited reasons. Syria’s seven-year-old civil war, that began in 201 started off as a movement to overthrow Bashar-al-Assad and his government. The war is being fought between various “factions”-rebel groups, democratic forces and Sunni rebels, opposition groups that formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that are backed up by various foreign and regional powers and the government. In a web of intricate relationships and complicated loyalties it is difficult to deduce which power is backing up which group.With new internal and external entrants, entangled dynamics have taken a convoluted dimension. This data visualization chart is an interesting and orderly way of presenting the relationships of this civil war.
Each party or group in the war is represented on the XY axis to be able to show multiple relationships that each of them has with the other. The legend and symbols are simple and makes the entire complex relationship easy to understand. I also loved the part where clicking on each symbol would present you with detailed status of the relationship. Overall, the chart is clean, systematic and provides easy to process information.
References-http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/06/syrian_conflict_relationships_explained.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War
Great observation. I didn’t realized until now that we chose same visualization for the blog post 🙂 I was really astonished by the vivid facial emoji with brief explanation. It is all age friendly and political amateur like me can easily interrupt what’s going on in Syria. I agree with what you said about the visualization example. If professors/ teachers use this to teach students in any history class, students won’t fall asleep 🙂
I agree Suelan.It was an interesting and visually simple approach to understand something that is so complex to remember as more and more participants get added to the equation.