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The sheer volume of data contained in that huge stack of Afghanistan war documents recently published by WikiLeaks reminds us that making sense of data and ‘connecting the dots’ in useful ways is getting harder – not easier.

Even text searching, that ubiquitous analytics tool that works so well for finding information on the Internet, loses its utility when so many of the same keywords are in each document. But by extracting and analyzing the WikiLeaks data and presenting it in a series of simple dashboard views, it’s possible to contextualize and make sense of what has unfolded over time.

In that vein, Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog has this post on several visualizations that have been created using open-source statistical programs and graphical plotting tools to document the spread of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan since 2004.

The picture it paints may not be pretty – Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman described it as watching “the insurgency metastasize” –but at least everyone can see at a glance what’s happening, and discern trends heretofore unseen.

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