Open kevinlitman-navarro opened 6 years ago
xeophin
commented
6 years ago Hi!
Hm, with a data quality like this I see why the Guardian would go with the dot visualisation. Definitely not an easy task you have set yourself.
Maybe it would be worth comparing these numbers with the total number of refugees and see whether the rate of deaths has risen during this time – which would, obviously be even more alarming.
sarahslo
commented
6 years ago so it looks like in the last 3 years things have gotten worse if you look at deaths by gun violence, suicide, and on the way to europe.
not knowing the dataset - can you tell me where those people are from in those categories for those years? and where they died?
i agree we do want to know the total number of refugees as well so we can understand if the rise is because there are more refugees in general. so if you can get the data above to break it down, you can do the same analysis by %.
in some ways, the percentage doesn't matter because if more people are refugees and more are dying that is what we need to see.
worthy project.
kevinlitman-navarro
commented
6 years ago Well I only have this one changed graphic, but hopefully it's more informative than all the previous ones. I spent some time looking for keywords and patterns in the descriptions of how the refugees died, and picked out a few categories of deaths after crossing the Mediterranean, because I find these particularly tragic.
Not really, trying to get more data but the UNHCR API was down, just need to spend more time working on the rest of it, too.
The problem of making the donut chart! But it was solved, to a certain extent. Still did most of the labeling in illustrator, which I know isn't ideal.
vpenney
commented
6 years ago Nice work so far! I like the doughnut graphic, although (obviously) it kind of has a blank hole in the middle--can you put something in there? Maybe make the middle section transparent, or the same color as the background?
Your Cat's Cradle excerpt talks about kids, and I know there's a bigger meaning there, but to take it at face value, you can actually regex out deaths of children, if you're interested in looking at that specifically.
This one is tougher, but I'm not sure how many people are looking at it, and it would involve a map: can you look at how far refugees are able to get before they die? You would have to set coordinates for each country/ city of origin, and then again for the place where they died, but I feel like that brings some humanity back into it--they came so far and ultimately they didn't make it.
If you're interested in keeping your country of incident bar chart, try highlighting countries that are in the EU to draw attention to them.
collleenwang
commented
6 years ago Nice work! I learned real something from your project! Particularly, I like your idea to highlight "gun violence" in the first chart! I understand your idea to show death and grey mood in this project, but I think maybe it's better to give some highlight color to the last four charts, because in humans' visual perception, all grey will be too easy to oversight.
kevinlitman-navarro
commented
6 years ago Tried to switch to dark theme, not sure how much it really works. Also corrected some mistaken calculations
Not really.
I tried to follow vpenney's suggestion and try to track the path of some the refugees, but after wasting way too much time getting my data into the rate shape and format I realized I'd made so many arbitrary decisions to make it work (assigning a country to something coded as a continent so I could map it, based on the countries that produce the most refugees) that it didn't really have much value.
sarahslo
commented
6 years ago I gather Soma taught you guys you can just add color to a sentence to make it work as a key? I see it a lot. Here I think it works against you. I can't read the dark red against the dark background. The yellow is too light too. This data, I think you simply need labels above the text blocks. And it's hard when you have dark background, dark type, light type, light color on the chart -- a dark background generally forces you to make everything light to be legible.
Let the data carry the color. If you want it to be moody, make the chart out of darker colors and let the background be white, or a super light gray.
kevinlitman-navarro
commented
6 years ago 
Headline: This story is about refugees
Published website version: this guy
Code repository: this guy
Final data set(s): UNITED List
The actual like, thinking and journalistic work of figuring out what was in the data and what story I could pull out of it.
Satisfied-ish. I kinda messed up the final page because I wanted to try ai to html, and I don't know that much html, so getting it all to fit in a way that made sense was a bit rough. I think if I did it again, I would find a couple characters and then do a profile for the regions of origin. At least, one more chart diving into African refugees would have been better, I think.
dbaptistr
commented
6 years ago I really liked the way you handled the topic and the visuals are very cool and informative. I would only change the area chart with the home region of the refugees to make it look more asymmetrical and perhaps add more colors to make it easier to discern the difference between the countries.
Great job!
Pitch
Summary
I decided to look at a list of migrant and refugee deaths compiled by the non-profit United Against Racism (in Data is Plural last week). The Guardian wrote a story about this list a few days ago, but their main visualizations were a large image with a dot representing each death meant to portray the scope of the problem, and a map highlighting deaths across time, and I didn't think it was super well done.
So I wanted to look at the data myself turned into a csv by these lovely people and see if there were any other stories hiding in the data. The Guardian talked about how lots of deaths happen once a person has reached the E.U., and I was particularly interested in these because they are should be preventable.
Details
Possible headline(s): Death After Danger: Waiting To Be Granted Asylum
Data set(s): The aforementioned list, would welcome ideas for other data I could use to find something interesting.
Code repository: This guy
Possible problems/fears/questions: The data is incredibly inconsistent. Rows represent not a single death, but a report incidence of a death or deaths. Lots of information (e.g. country of origin) is unknown for many entries. Also this is like, really sad and fucked up, and drawing line graphs and bar charts doesn't do the data justice. I'm not sure how you visually make the data more meaningful, but I like the idea of juxtaposing charts with passages from literature to provide some sort of human meaning.
This is probably a TL;DR moment, but I kept thinking about this passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle while working on the data:
"'We are gathered here friends,' he said, 'to honour lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya [one hundred martyrs to democracy], children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya died, my own son died.
My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.
I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honour and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.
But they are murdered children all the same.
And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about to see - and a thrilling show it really will be.....
And hooray say I for thrilling shows.
But if today is really in honour of a hundred children murdered in war is today a day for a thrilling show?
The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and of all mankind."
Work so far
Done lots of cleaning and actual, manual reading to try and pick out patterns. Made the below charts, which are different degrees of interesting/boring. Didn't have the momentum to go into illustrator and add annotations.
Checklist
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