Numbers Matter
Visualizing the number of articles per day in May seemed to be the more intuitive in terms of analyzing the coverage of the Rohingya crisis. This data does not include republished articles, and each one that is counted is a unique web address.
Going through the article archive, this data was also the easiest to collect in that it is simply looking at how many articles appeared per day. This data highlights frequency, but does not necessarily tell us what kind of reporting is being done. It is only how many articles are published. I chose to show this data in two ways that are only minorly different, but they have different rhetorical impacts. The variables on the graphs are the same, and the only thing that has changed is how the data points are mapped into the space. One is a bar graph, and the other is a line graph. I chose the same colors (inspired by the advice given in The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics) to represent the same data. The bar graph makes it seem like each day is separate and discrete. The line graph, however, does something slightly different in that there seems to be more of a continuity between days. The end of each day leads into the next. When there is no article, there is still a line that connects the days together making it seem like a visual narrative that emerges from the chart.
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- The Power of Words Melissa M. Chan
