Aye Matey! Piracy - 2000 to 2022

January 2023 #ProjectDataViz Challenge
Published by David Velleca on 4 January 2023

This Month's Theme

I just recently finished a season of Aaron Mahnke's Podcast "Grim & Mild Presents" where the theme was Pirates. The show focused on historical acts of piracy - mostly in the Carribbean - but in the final episode, they mentioned how many acts of piracy are still recorded every year. That got me thinking...

A small bit of research later, and I had found the United Nations' International Maritime Organization which focuses on the safety and security of international shipping, while also focusing on reducing the environmental impact of shipping. From what I can tell, the IMO aggregates data that has been reported to individual reporting authorities and publishes it on their website. With this as the case, there are some callouts about the dataset:

  • Many of the earlier records are missing Latitude and Longitude data. This seems to clear up in the middle of 2006 - however you may notice some anomalies where provided coordinates lie in the middle of a continent...
  • Some other data is also missing - there are several ship names "not reported," missing ship statuses and more

I decided not to exclude this data, as there still seem to be some interesting insights in the data. I knew that there was still piracy in the world, but did not realize how widespread it was. I can't wait to see what insights we can uncover in the data.

The Data Source

Our data source is hosted on our Data.World page. We've created an Excel version and a CSV, both should work, just providing both versions in case you want to enrich the data more easily in Excel:

Get Vizzing!

For consideration in the January Viz Roundup, entries will be accepted up until 31st January. Shortly thereafter a review article will be released to summarise and highlight entries.

For your entries, be sure to:

  • Publish on Tableau Public with hashtag #ProjectDataViz
  • Share to Twitter with hashtag #ProjectDataViz
  • Share to LinkedIn with hashtag #ProjectDataViz
  • Submit your Viz to Project Data Viz
  • Cite the data source on your viz! The citation for this month should be:
    • Data Source: International Maritime Organization

Good luck and we look forward to your awesome entries.