
Show HN: A Rogue State Along Two Rivers - jashkenas
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/world/middleeast/syria-iraq-isis-rogue-state-along-two-rivers.html
======
panarky
This is one of the most effective infographics I've seen, right up there with
Napoleon's March to Moscow[1]. I spent at least an hour with it this morning
and it changed my understanding of Iraq, Syria and ISIL.

I'm used to thinking in terms of national borders, but this shows how the
population is organized by the Tigris and Euphrates, not by artificial lines
on a map.

ISIL understands this well, making the Iraq/Syria border into a pretty
meaningless imaginary line. The ISIL blitz seems like it came from nowhere,
but this dramatically illustrates their methodical progression, over time,
following the rivers.

I found myself wanting to know more about the communities, lakes, dams, roads,
borders, sects, nationalities other features highlighted in this piece, so I
spent another hour manually linking to Google Earth and Wikipedia to drill
into more detail.

Along the way I found a lot of content on YouTube of ISIL takeovers of cities,
burning of vehicles and disturbing images of executions and crucifixions. I'd
seen some of this before, but it would be really powerful to link selected
videos and images from the ground directly to places on the map.

I'd be interested in the editorial process at the NYT, how this evolved from
idea to realization, who supplied the content, and how the development team
coordinated with the reporters.

And I'd like to understand more about how the autonomous Kurdish region fits
into this story, both geographically as well as politically and militarily.

[1]
[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters)

~~~
delinka
"I found myself wanting to know more [...], so I spent another hour manually
linking to Google Earth and Wikipedia to drill into more detail. / Along the
way I found a lot of content on YouTube..."

Completely off-topic, but _this_ is why network access should be considered
crucial to human existence.

~~~
webmaven
Technically not off-topic, just a digression.

------
Hopka
It is not working at all on either Firefox 30 or Chromium 34 (both Ubuntu).
All I see is two large maps and a bit of text in between.

The developer console has a few CORS errors, though:

> XMLHttpRequest cannot load
> [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/06/18/tigris-...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/06/18/tigris-
> and-euphrates/d4a56d136bb9d40ec16f882df983fe464c4cf69c/syria_and_iraq.json).
> No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested
> resource. Origin '[http://www.nytimes.com'](http://www.nytimes.com') is
> therefore not allowed access.

> XMLHttpRequest cannot load
> [http://core2_euw1.fabrik.nytimes.com./info](http://core2_euw1.fabrik.nytimes.com./info).
> No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested
> resource. Origin '[http://www.nytimes.com'](http://www.nytimes.com') is
> therefore not allowed access.

I suppose accessing through nytimes.com would work, but it redirects to
www.nytimes.com...

~~~
jashkenas
It seems odd that browsers on Ubuntu would be getting CORS errors — while the
same browsers for everyone else would not. CORS, being a policy, should apply
consistently, no? Perhaps you've changed a setting somewhere?

Either way, I've made a note to look into setting Access-Control-Allow-Origin
headers on all the static assets we publish out to Graphics8...

~~~
Hopka
OK, I've been digging into this a bit further. When I do a request from a
remote machine, I do get an Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header, but from my
local machine, this header is missing.

I assume that the proxy on this network discards the header and thus breaks
the site.

~~~
jashkenas
Thanks for following up. That'll save me some time ;)

------
jashkenas
Happy to answer questions about this, if folks have any...

~~~
pcl
It's incredibly cool that you got a by-line, and the lead position for that
matter. Is that due to the work you did coding the project, or because of your
role coming up with the idea, mentioned in your other comment [1], or because
of some other journalism you did on the project that you haven't mentioned?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986383)

~~~
jashkenas
Bylines are alphabetical in this case.

Since folks seem to be curious, here's the division of labor:

I pitched the idea, stitched together some Landsat photos as a proof of
concept and a rough design, built out and implemented the page, worked on
labels and city outlines, and helped out with picking some locations and
editing.

Karen did most of the reporting and research on this. She's also responsible
for much of the reporting on the ongoing map stack graphic.

Derek helped out with the Landsat color toning and burning in city shapes,
built the locator map and the Baghdad odometer, and confirmed some of the
statuses.

Archie worked on a ton of the writing, polished the design, and did a mountain
of editing to boil it down to the essentials. He also kept everything
coordinated, as a good Graphics Editor will do...

Nilkanth did some yeoman's work on tracing city shapes...

Bostock provided the final projections for both the Euphrates and Tigris maps,
fixing my original broken projections.

The Baghdad bureau confirmed Karen's reporting, and added helpful notes and
suggestions which were incorporated.

(apologies in advance if I forgot anything...)

~~~
peqnp
You know, I'm so conflicted about you. On the one hand, I greatly admire much
of the open source code you've released, while on the other, it irks me
considerably, the way you glorify working at such a despicable imperialist
propaganda machine; a veritable house of lies.

A site partly created by Julian Assange with lots more great information:
[http://www.nytexaminer.com/](http://www.nytexaminer.com/)

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fredsters_s
Is this a legit Show HN? It looks more like an article from the New York times
to me.

~~~
jewel
I think so, based on my reading of the guidelines. jashkenas, a regular poster
here at HN, is almost certainly designed and programmed the scrolling
illustration.

~~~
malokai
He created Coffeescript, Backbone.js, and Underscore.js. Now works at NYT.

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codezero
Content aside, I think it's really cool how the map area expands with the
window and the mini-map's red rectangle accurately represents your view in the
browser window. Very neat.

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emeltzz
Wow. This is one of the best graphical presentations I've ever seen.

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jqm
Wow, this is beautiful work. Kudos to the authors.

Now, to go examine the actual content.... Eh, never mind, it's too depressing.
I think I'll just jealously admire the scroll down again.

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austinz
I read this article the other day, and I really enjoyed both the presentation
and the content. The historical and (especially) geographic context provided
by the article is really helpful when it comes to trying to understand where
ISIS came from, and how it could have taken over so much of Iraq so quickly.

------
lugg
Impressive mobile support as always. Very well done, kudos nyt!

------
novaleaf
Sorry, how is this a "Show HN"?

~~~
dang
It's something the submitter (along with others) made, and other people can
play with it—in this case, because it's interactive. So I'd say it meets the
definition at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

We don't want to be too strict about this because creative work can take many
forms. Mostly we just want to exclude vaporware.

