Diary Dig: Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries explorer

August 1, 2010 8:43 AM

Diary Dig: Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries explorer
A richly faceted and deeply hyperlinked browser for all of the as-yet released Afghan War Diaries from Wikileaks. Allows you to search by type, category, number of casualties, and many other parameters. Within each document, uncommon phrases that are shared among multiple documents are linked together, allowing you to go down the rabbit hole where you might not have otherwise thought to. My hope is that this will allow reporters, researchers, and the general public to better understand the scope and nature of the US war in Afghanistan, and the contents of this important archive. Source code available.
posted by yourcelf (1 comment total)

Now that's a lot of work. I see you've linked to the Guardian's glossary which defines abbreviations and explains some terms, but leaves out other stuff, like the difference in the levels of secret classification, and what the DColors are. These are useful to understand the docs, and would be nice to have on the site as well.
Also, have you had a look at MIT's Simile project, specifically the Exhibit widget? It allows for highly faceted dynamic search and filtering.
posted by neetij at 10:35 AM on August 22, 2010