Visualizing Crisis: News, the Rohingya, and knowledge formation

Visualizing Crisis: News, the Rohingya, and knowledge formation

Ethnic and religious tensions have been high in the history of modern Myanmar (formerly Burma). With the majority of the country being ethnically Bamar and Buddhist, ethnic and religious minorities have been marginalized and subject to state violence. One such instance of violence has been the government's policy towards citizenship. Only officially recognized minority groups are allowed to apply for citizenship. if an ethnic group is not recognized, they cannot apply for citizenship and are, therefore, stateless individuals. This policy has most notably been enacted in relation to the Rohingya ethnic group, who mainly inhabit the Rakhine region, and the province has been plagued by violence since 2012. Not only are they considered an unrecognized ethnicity, but they are also marginalized in Myanmar because they are Muslim. As a result, they have been persecuted by the state as unlawful residents and forced to leave Myanmar. To escape these conditions, many Rohingya are trafficked on fishing boats trying to get to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

International news has covered numerous aspects of the Rohingya crisis. On May 1st, 2015, mass graves with bodies of those trafficked from Bangladesh and Rakhine were discovered. With this development, I was curious to see if what kind of news coverage emerges in the time immediately following this discovery. In this comparative visualization, I looked at the news site Reuters' coverage of the crisis in the month of May in 2015. Rather than examining sites that are polarizing in their reporting, Reuters' coverage has been considered fairly neutral. I was particularly interested in seeing how the news referred to the Rohingya and if it changed over the course of the month. Some questions I had about the way in which the crisis was covered are as follows: did a sense of urgency emerge as the month went on? What kinds of words were used to refer to the Rohingya and what tone did they strike? Did these words and their usage fluctuate over the month, and if they did, why? To reflect on these questions, I constructed three visualizations. One is a word cloud. The second and third visualizations are bar graphs. The final visualization is an image collage. I only included articles published online on Reuters and the body text. I did not include photo story headlines for the first three visualizations. In the first few days of May, there were no online articles about the Rohingya. Most articles were published in the middle of the month, and by the end of the month the number of articles decreased.

The second portion of this project, "The Mourning News" is a research presentation on the relationship between data, mourning, and the human in conditions of crisis. It explores how data and its representation differentiates between the human and the inhuman, which invokes affective relationships that are ambivalent but also networked in larger emotive flows.

The third part, "Crisis Coverage," is a project prototype. 
 

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