Mapping Loss — Libraries and Lives in Palestine

This project visualizes the destruction of Palestinian libraries alongside the lives lost on or around the same dates, creating a powerful data-driven narrative that links cultural annihilation with human tragedy.

PROJECT TITLE: Mapping Loss — Libraries and Lives in Palestine

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Libraries are not just repositories of books—they are symbols of memory, culture, and resistance. In Palestine, the destruction of libraries is not an isolated act of war; it represents a broader erasure of heritage. This project visualizes the destruction of Palestinian libraries alongside the lives lost on or around the same dates, creating a powerful data-driven narrative that links cultural annihilation with human tragedy.

RATIONALE STATEMENT:

The objective is to create a comprehensive infographic that:

• Maps Palestinian libraries destroyed between 2013–2025.
• Aligns each destruction event with daily death tolls and identifies individuals from the cultural sector martyred on the same date.
• Presents a visual narrative showing the parallel erosion of cultural memory and human life.

WORKFLOW: Data Extraction via Python & Pandas using a script has been developed using Python and the Pandas library to scrape data from the Librarians with Palestine 2024 Gaza Report.

This script has:

• Identified library names, destruction dates, and news sources.
• Normalized and exported the scraped information into a DataFrame and then CSV for analysis.
• Custom data set manual CSV entry of dates of loss of cultural institutions, martyr names, and casualty figures.

FURTHER USES:

This project will serve as:

• A tool for public education and media engagement.
• A dataset for future researchers studying cultural erasure.
• A memorial artifact that preserves the stories behind destroyed institutions and lost lives.

FILES LIST

1. 2504-week11-librarydataframe.ipynb: Website data scrape of known cultural institutions that existed and are now destroyed in Palestine
2. plot-libraries.ipynb: Visualization in Pandas
3. olivetree.ipynb: Visualization in Plotly
4. gaza_libraries_2024.csv: Dataframe that includes the list of libraries and all the information that was manually entered.