Wikileaks US Embassy Cables

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. Here’s how media outlets strive to make the data more accessible than its original form.

While the data will be released in stages over the next few months to the general public, five publications around the world have had prior access to the material. New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel were given access on condition that they observed common deadlines over the timings of release.

Wikileaks have created a set of interactive visualizations to give an overview over the amount, origin subject, categorization, program, topic and classification of the leaked documents. The visualizations are created using Tableau Public which seems to have a good adoption in the online journalism space lately.

The Guardian shows us in an information graphic where the cables come from. Furthermore, they have refined the dataset to be downloaded or accessed directly on Google Fusion Tables. The data can be downloaded from the Guardian Data Blog in in three versions:

• Every cable with date, time and tags, excluding body text
• The Guardian’s analysis of the cable by location and tag
• The glossary of keywords and tags

On a page dedicated to the Wikileaks release The Guardian collects all articles related to the publication.

El Pais has also published an information graphic showing the origin and amount of cables by country.

Der Spiegel Online has created an interactive atlas that maps the dispatches by country, classification and year of recording.

On a sidenote: Jer Thorp seems to be working on a visualization of the dataset already. See his Flickr set for the first drafts.

Are there any other visualizations based on the most recenty Wikileaks release? If you know of any, please share them in the comments.