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Information is beautiful — and heartbreaking [1]

['Gail Sherman']

Date: 2025-07-21

The Information is Beautiful Awards celebrate "beauty in data visualization, infographics, interactives & information art." The 2024 winners were announced last month. All the winners are interesting, but there is one entry I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

The gold medal winner in the Current Affairs and Politics category is "The Birdsong of Sorrow above Ukraine" by Anastasia Balagurova. Balagurova, who is Russian by birth, is a graduate student at Aalto University in Finland, and the project is part of her master's thesis, "Visualising people in humanitarian crises: Where numbers meet empathy."

The following warning precedes the data visualization.

Each civilian life lost in the war in Ukraine, caused by Russian aggression, carries a story—of someone who should still be here. This project aims to reflect on the scale of these losses and seeks to represent each life lost. Please take a moment and proceed only if you feel ready.

The data can be viewed all at once or broken down by month. Whichever you choose, you may think you are ready, but you probably aren't. March of 2022 has so many birds, they overlap and almost become one, but you can still see all the little blue birds.

Image: Anastasia Balagurova

Every bird a person. So many blue birds.

Previously:

• Ukraine used open-source drone software to wreck Russian bombers

• 15 reasons why the world needs Ukrainian victory, by a historian of political atrocity

• Zelenskyy's Ukraine destroys over one-third of Russia's fighters and bombers

• This map users Twitter posts to show Russian invasion of Ukraine

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