- Edward Said (1996)

        Mapping is indisputably political.  Throughout history, maps have often been created and used for military and imperial purposes, which can exaggerate or deflate issues depending on the politics of the creator. Counter-cartographies, as Said describes, are an integral component in addressing military or dominant biases in mapping.  Technologies such as open source databases and ArcGIS are powerful tools in facilitating the creation of these counter-cartographies.

        Taking into consideration that biases exist in military and media representations of Baghdad, with this project we aim to produce maps that we feel more fairly represent the history of the Iraq war, with particular attention to civilian deaths.  Civilian deaths have often been seen as a necessary side effect of modern warfare.  Though civilian deaths account for 76% of the deaths in Baghdad, they are hardly talked about in mainstream media, much less represented on maps.  Using ArcMap10 and Wikileaks data on the war in Iraq, we explore different methods of processing and visually communicatingdata through a series of maps and animations.  These maps are designed to promote knowledge of civilian deaths in Baghdad.  The first series of maps explores deaths in residential buffer zones to shed light on the far reaches of conflict in a densely populated urban area. The next maps use semi-transparent raster surfaces  to highlight concentrations of civilian death and injury, and the misrepresentation of predicted wounded civilians.  Lastly, using animation tools in ArcGIS, we visualize deaths from the Iraq war chronologically.