Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Italian Prisoner Deaths on Google Maps


Italian journalist Jacopo Ottaviani (twitter.com/jackottaviani) has been investigating the deaths of prisoners within the Italian justice system. You can read Jacopo's report in Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italian) or in the Guardian (English).

Using a Google Map Jacopo has plotted nearly a thousand prisoner deaths from 2002 until 2012. At different zoom levels you can view pie charts on the map showing the percentages of the causes of death in that region. The figures show that over half of the deaths in Italian prisons are the result of suicide.

In the Guardian Jacopo explains how he created the map. The "Data was scraped using ScraperWiki and refined with Google Refine; the resultant tables were merged using Google Fusion and finally visualised through Batchgeo."

No comments: