Visualizing Crisis: News, the Rohingya, and knowledge formation
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.