n this project selected for the Visualizar ’09 workshop at the Media Lab Prado, Jihyun Kim and I created an interactive visualization of the correlations between international flight travel and the outbreaks of global diseases during the first decade of the 21st century: SARS, Avian Flu, and influenza A (H1N1). Our assumption was that events such as these worldwide pandemics can have an effect on the influx of people traveling between countries, specially if those countries are the affected by the disease. In a more general way, international flight travel could indicate the occurrence of specific historical events (related to health, politics, economics, etc) by sudden (or more progressive) changes in the total numbers of passenger traveling between countries.
We used data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), in particular from the “Air Carriers: T-100 International Segment” database from BTS. The visualization only shows international flights that start or stop in the US, and represents the “distance” between each country and the US as proportional to the number of passengers per month. The source code of the visualization tool is here. For more details, check this blogpost (and an update.)