Visualizing Crisis: News, the Rohingya, and knowledge formation

The Power of Words

To construct this word cloud I looked at all of the articles in the month of May related to the Rohingya on Reuters and how each article referred to the Rohingya within the text. It is not a total of how many times each word appeared in the archives, but rather how many articles used specific words to refer to the Rohingya. The word cloud prioritizes the words themselves and the frequency in which they appear rather than the timing of the appearance of the word. It also cannot tell us when a word emerged in the reporting. Its rhetorical advantage is that it can convey the frequency of a word and what word(s) is the dominant one at a glance. At the same time, this may be misleading in that the significance of a word is inextricably tied to how many times it appears. In fact, equivalency of frequency and importance is not always true. For example, the word refugee is quite small and seemingly unimportant for the reports, but “refugee” is a word packed with numerous implications about reasons why a person moves or migrates.


Here's the ngram for boat people and boatpeople (added 3/7).

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