Explore spatial trends in the Syrian Civil War from 1 October, 2013 to 31 December, 2013. In order to compare dataset resolution, data points are binned by grid cell and week.
Data is from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), a global catalog of human behavior events that attempts to track relationships and context between groups of people or “actors.” GDELT works by scraping numerous worldwide news sources on a daily basis as well as historical news archives from 1979 to present. It assigns a variety of attributes to news stories such as actor role, actor type, city/landmark, ethnic/religious affiliation, number of articles referencing an event, etc. in an attempt to uncover trends of events and relationships of the players involved.
GDELT is still a new dataset. As such, it's inherent biases are still largely unknown; this exploratory project is intended in part as an initial examination of the dataset's utiltiy.
Find the python code on github. For questions/comments on the data analysis and cartography, contact James Conkling: james.lane.conkling@gmail.com