ITP Spring Show 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2-6pm & Monday, May 11, 5-9 pm
 

Liangjie Xia

Visualization of US Military Intervention

200 years of US military intervention history visualized

http://leejayxia.com/project/intervention

Classes
Mainstreaming Information


"The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to 'protectorates' such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers." (via A BRIEFING ON THE HISTORY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS, By Zoltán Grossman, October 2001)

People might be familiar with recent US military interventions in Middle East, or those in Asia in 1970s, however in the past 200 years' history, overseas interventions actually happened a lot more frequent than people usually think and played an important role to this country's development.

This visualization is not intended to create a narrative piece of intervention history, it's more created as a tool to go through the mass amount of history events and discover the correlations among those events in a certain period of time, or within a certain region.

Audience
General public who have any interest in history or international relationships.

User Scenario
The visualization plays by itself, showing event after event in chronicle order. A viewer could pause it at any time to see the detail description of the events, or directly point to a single event to switch to it.

Implementation
Built with processing.