On December 7 data wranglers, maptivists and arm chair researchers got together for an online Data Expedition to analyse the Nigerian extractive industry in a collaboration between School of Data, African Media Initiative and OpenOil. More than 30 participants checked into the Unhangout, took part in one of the three teams and joined trainings on mapping. session wherefrom presentations and trainings where conducted.
Below you will find some of the results from the amazing work that the teams pulled off on the day and during the following days to unlock data from the explored corners of pipelines and company registrations within the oil contractors in Nigeria.

###Investigating the corporate networks in Nigeria’s oil industry
A team of dedicated researchers collected data on more than 100 companies within the corporate supply chain of the oil industry contributing to a Gephi network visualisation (image below). The network analysis shows how companies in the extractives sector are connected based on contracts and ownership and thanks to the team the network expanded substantially during the expedition leaving a model for future research.

In another company analysis project Khadija Sharife, an investigative journalist from African Media Initiative, collected a list of oil rigs operating off-shore in Nigeria.

###Mapping the pipelines and other parts of the oil infrastructure
Another team headed up an exercise to map essential elements of the oil infrastructure in 12 of the highest producing concession areas operated by Big Oil. Participants traced water basins located near oil drills, pipelines and other items which could be identified from satellite imagery. The map below below shows the annotations completed during the expedition.

View Nigeria Onshore Concessions – First Round in a larger map

###Analysing the revenues from oil
The third team conducted an analysis of the government revenues from the oil industry and its impact on the Nigerian budget. Participants started out by reviewing the complex revenue flows, oil terminology and revenue data available from the Nigeria country report to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. As part of the work on revenue analysis Heather Leson headed up some data collection of the Canadian extractive industry and its interests in Nigeria. The team extracted data on Nigeria’s oil and gas revenues from 2009-2011 from the 2012 NEITI report and ended up with this treemap.

You can find all the their notes in this team scratch pad.