Saturday, May 8, 2010

Infographic on Afghan scenarios with Prezi

I, like quite a few other people, posted on the recent NYT article which showed a horrendously complex PowerPoint slide created to depict the situation in Afghanistan, and the challenges facing US military decision makers.

Another more informative view of the Afghan predicament can be found at a German site called The Afghan Conflict, which appears to be the result of collaboration between Marc Tiedemann and several colleagues to produce a visual map of possible scenarios in the conflict. From the site
When we started researching this topic we very quickly saw, that the debate whether to pull out the troops, staying or even enforcing is not too much about arguments, it’s a battle of possible scenarios. Every side seems to have their own positive and negative visions of how things will happen in the future if certain steps are done. The resulting map The Afghan Conflict - A Map of Possible Scenarios is the attempt of a summary of the most popular possible scenarios around the afghan conflict, according to a pullout or stay of the Allied troops. And is based on interviews with journalists, politicians and political foundations.
The resulting scenario map is quite large and the authors have not tried to compress it onto a single PowerPoint slide for convenience of presentation (double click the image below to see a larger version).

image

The scenario map is available as a poster but also as a Prezi animation which allows you to navigate across the scenarios and zoom in and out of detail (I cannot find a way to link to the Prezi animation directly so you will have to view it from the The Afghan Conflict site). I will have more to say about Prezi in future posts, and it appears to be a good navigation tool for complex “infoscapes” like the Afghan situation. In the meantime please take a look at the showcase presentations at the Prezi site.

No comments: