dronestream 2 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

May 10 2013

Location: 

The Internet

Josh Begley, a Data Artist and NYU Student, took publicly available information on recorded drone strikes and designed an interface for people to connect and sympathize with the reality of U.S. drone attacks.

What started out as a political performance piece on Twitter, turned into the development of an app repeatedly denied by the iTunes store. After changing the name and some modest revisions, it is now available and information on drone attacks are updating in real time.

In an effort to visualize how the frequency of strikes had gone up over the last decade, Begley initially set out to tweet every drone strike he had data for and to do it in 10 minutes. He announced the effort on Reddit, and had gotten through a fraction of them when he realized it was going a lot longer.

He built an app, Drones+, which was rejected by Apple three times. Eventually getting accepted as "dronestream".

Dronestream not only allows people to follow the history of U.S. military strikes, but also download the data and make their own useful visualizations and tools.

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