Getting to know the Mafia

One of the biggest problems facing Italy is the phenomenon of organised crime.

Freelance information designer, Federica Fragapane, uses data visualization to focus in on the issue.

Organized Crime in Northern Italy is a unique tool that enables users to explore organised crime data across nine provinces in northern Italy between 2000 and 2012.

Throughout the project Federica worked closely with journalists and academics, who will be using the visualizations to enhance their own data analysis and research.

Data was meticulously extracted from the annual reports of the Direzione Nazionale Antimafia using Text-to-Knowledge technology with the help of the "Antonio Zampolli" Institute of Computational Linguistics and ItaliaNLP Lab. 

On top of all that, we think it’s pretty beautiful too!

The project was created as part of Federica's Masters' thesis at Politecnico di Milano. You can find out more about her approach and methodology in this Storybench interview.