A Digital Narrative of the Halabja Massacre

Ghazaleh Tabatabaei

This poster is a generative data visualization based on the Silent City (commemoration of Halabja) music stimulus and the chemical bombardment war casualties of Halabja and Sardasht in 1987 and 1988.

The design attempts to visualize the tragedy and give the public a way to feel with the individuals involved instead of limiting the data to numbers. This data visualization is generated with Silent City’s engagement rates measured through an EEG examination. The main goal of this poster is to narrate the history with accurate data without excluding the sense of tragedy, to depict the destructive effects of countries' access to chemical weapons, and allow audiences from various cultures to get a sense of the Kurdish people's loss.

The length of the red lines in the center of the graph is determined by the engagement rate data and the number of family members a person lost. The names are sorted such that the number of family members lost and the height of the engagement rate match. The matching was done with Grasshopper's Data Tree.