During my year as a CSW Research Scholar, my research program has turned in exciting new directions, largely because of the opportunities afforded me through my affiliation with CSW. I began collaborating with Professor P. Jeffrey Brantingham of the department of anthropology at UCLA on a digital-cultural mapping project of violent events in Baghdad compiled from the Iraq Body count data. my expertise in cultural anthropology, the middle east, and my Arabic language skills helped to jump- start the project while Prof. Brantingham’s experience in mapping and modeling crime in the Los Angeles area provided the project’s technical foundation.