The beauty of data visualizations is that they can describe something incomprehensible through data alone — even if that something is a tragedy.
During the London Blitz, from October 7, 1940 to June 6, 1941, bombs dropped by German planes killed some 40,000 Londoners. Bomb Sight, a project from the University of Portsmouth, used data from original bomb census maps and historical images to create a web app with every bomb dropped on London during that assault.
The result is a map of London, taken from OpenStreetMap, riddled with red dots. Zoomed in to a neighborhood, each dot offers info about the specific bomb (or bombs) dropped on that location. Zoom out, and the picture gets cluttered, showing a city bathed in explosives. The quantity is shocking.
The team of eight behind Bomb Sight included members from universities and private companies, designers, developers, and researchers. In addition to the visualization, Bomb Sight added stories from the BBC's World War II archive, tagged to each section of the city.
Bomb Sight is also working on an Android augmented reality app, which shows the bombs dropped in your area as you swing your camera around London streets.
