Unlocking the mundane mysteries of the world
Congratulations; Hell Week is over. In preparation for Hell Week Redux, whenever it may arrive (next week), this week's newsletter flips data visualization on its head, focusing on a fascinating project that extracts data from presentations that wouldn't seem to include any.
Also, President Trump shared a chart that we should talk about. As I said: Hell Week.
Chapter 1
Inverted data visualization
When I first saw it in 2015, the photograph below reshaped my approach to journalism.
You will be forgiven if it is not immediately apparent why. At a glance, it looks like a not-particularly-interesting scene from a city, maybe one — if one were to engage in a little Geoguessrism — somewhere in Europe.
But there's a detail that, a decade ago, made this photo particularly important: That brownish-green vehicle that's about to pass behind the tree at the righthand edge of the picture. That is a Russian Buk missile launcher, a system that, a few hours later, would fire the projectile that downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing nearly 300 people.
Russia fervently denied (and still denies) involvement. So knowing where this missile launcher was and when became an important part of the investigation. But, with no metadata attached to the picture — digital information appended to photos or videos that can include time, location and camera data — how could investigators prove that the Buk was in the right place at the right time?
Enter Bellingcat. Founded by Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat is an independent collective of open-source investigators, people who work together to review publicly available information — like the photo above, which was posted to social media — and fit them into complex puzzles.
In the case of the photo, finding the physical location was perhaps the easy part. It was in a town called Torez, in the contested Donetsk region of Ukraine. But the amateur investigators were also able to determine the time of day by looking at the shadows. The sun was almost overhead, just as it was at about 12:30 on the day of the attack.