website templates

DRONE WARS

This is a data-driven narrative about the U.S. drone campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, & Yemen. Written & developed by UCLA digital humanities students using drone-enabled airstrike data from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

DRONE WARS is a group project completed for an introductory digital humanities course taught at UCLA during the fall quarter of 2018, under the direction of Dr. Ashley Sanders Garcia and Craig Messner.

Students were tasked with using humanities methodologies to critically analyzing a publicly-accessible database of their choosing. The final project challenges students to make a critical argument about their data & present it in narrative form.

Our group chose a combination of four datasets from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism regarding the U.S. drone campaign in four different countries.


THE BUREAU'S DATABASE OUR DATA CRITIQUE

OUR RESEARCH QUESTIONS

  1. DO THE BENEFITS OF DRONE WARFARE OUTWEIGH THE HUMAN COSTS?
  2. WHAT ROLE DO HUMAN ACTORS PLAY IN THE SHAPING OF DRONE WARFARE (EITHER THROUGH POLICY, DOCUMENTATION, AND/OR JOURNALISM)?

MEET THE TEAM

All teammembers were involved with research, writing, and content strategy. Team roles were assigned so that the designated person is responsible for the quality and execution of various parts of the project.

Leia Yen

Project Manager

Miguel Gutierrez

Web Developer

Kristen Tang

Data Quality Analyst

Lian Mae Tualla

Data Visualization Specialist

Sanjana Giduthuri

Data Visualization Specialist

  • LEIA - oversaw the planning and execution of the project by ensuring that the team kept up with the schedule and hit milestones. She guided the team through effective and open communication while documenting and delegating tasks. She edited the research/written components and created the heat map. She is a fourth-year English major and Digital Humanities/Global Studies double minor.
  • MIGUEL - designed and developed the website including the information architecture and content strategy preliminary frameworks. He was responsible for all the wireframes and designed the visual components of the site to meet accessibility standards and to create cohesive branding. He is fourth year Art History major and Digital Humanities minor.  
  • KRISTEN - oversaw the cleaning, refining, augmenting, and geolocating of the dataset, ensuring standardized, usable, and well-formatted data. She created the animated map and histogram, as well as assisted in refining and troubleshooting the web development code. She is a fourth-year Cognitive Science major and Digital Humanities minor. 
  • LIAN - created the beeswarm, packed bubble chart, and area graph data visualizations using a combination of RAWGraphs, Tableau, and Photoshop. She is a third-year Environmental Science major and Digital Humanities/Environmental Systems and Society double minor. 
  • SANJANA - was responsible for refining the data to include columns for President, the “Other” demographic, and the Ratio of Civilian to Total Deaths Per Strike. She created the stacked, side-by-side bar graphs and packed bubble chart data visualizations using Tableau. She is a third-year Statistics major and Digital Humanities minor. 

WEBSITE PRESENTATION NOTES:

Website development comes with a lot of responsibilities to those who use it. In honor of accessibility, we took design measures to provide an inclusive learning environment.

Color Blind Conscious

We recognize that color blindness poses as an obstacle with particular respect to UI design and data visualizations. In our project we aimed at including high contrast typefaces, buttons, and visual descriptors and used monochromatic images and video to make our site both beautiful and accessible.

Screen Reader Friendly

For our readers who use an application that reads what is on screen to them: we have tried our best to keep our information architecture as simple as possible with no drop down menus, we use skip-ahead buttons allowing for easy page navigation, and use descriptive hyperlinks. We hope you find your navigation of this site a pleasant experience.

Considerate of Limited Mobility Impairments

Limiting our information architecture unfortunately results in very long pages. In order to make navigating these pages easier, we concentrate skip-ahead buttons at the top these pages.

No Audio-Based Media

Sound-based information isn’t accessible to all users. In order to ensure all parts of our project was accessible to those with hearing impairments, there is no use of audio on this site.

For more information concerning usability and accessibility in web design practices, here are a few resources from usability.gov we encourage you to explore:

ACESSIBILITY BASICS USABILITY VS. ACCESSIBILITY DESIGNING FOR COLOR-BLINDNESS

QUESTIONS?

Feel free to reach out