The final skills test for my Digital Newsroom assignment is all about data. For this skills test, we had to find some data from the Guardian's Data Store and manipulate it into something useful.
The data store had lots of interesting sets of data but the one that caught my eye was a list of every prisoner of war camp in the UK. The article attached to the data said “What would happen if the UK's prison population suddenly increased by 400,000 people? That's what occurred between 1939 and 1948, when thousands of Germans, Ukrainians and others became Britain's prisoners of war, according to a new book.”
This got me thinking, there has been a lot in the news in the past few years about overcrowding in Britain’s prisons and I started to think about if prisons became too full, would history repeat itself leading to Britain needing to re-open some of its prisoner of war camps to contain criminals?
Once we had found some data we had to create some sort of graph to display the data in a format a reader would understand with great ease.
Using Wordle, I created a graph to show the prisoner of war camps by their county. The bigger the word, the more camps the county had. As you can see Yorkshire had the most prisoner of war camps in Britain. The original graph can be found here.
I also decided to see how many prisoner of war camps there were in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The chart from these findings can be seen below. By clicking on the graph you can see a larger version.
This chart was created in Microsoft Excel and clearly shows that the majority of prisoner of war camps were in England. The section of the chart labelled UK represents Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. The data supplied by the Guardian lists the three places as part of the UK.
The following links are references to overcrowding in Britain's prisons from the last few years.
You can contact me on FDent1@uclan.ac.uk if you have any questions.
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