lucypapachristou
commented
2 years ago Hi Nikhil! Thanks for your thoughts.
I understand your point about the data needing to enhance the narrative story. I can definitely contact someone from an aid organization for a quote to contextualize the data, and I can also interview someone who themselves experienced this violence for another quote. I'm worried about the piece getting too long, though. We only have 150-200 words, correct?
There is also this wonderful resource, the "Black Book of Pushbacks," a 1,500 page book of more than 12,000 border violence testimonies published by the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a watchdog organization. I know many people at BVMN and could speak to them. (Here's a link: https://www.borderviolence.eu/launch-event-the-black-book-of-pushbacks/) This "Black Book" was something of a big deal among left politicians in the European Parliament, and continues to be used for advocacy purposes to put pressure on the governments carrying out these violent acts. Anyway, I don't want to write too much here, but maybe we can discuss in class if you still have concerns.
And as to your point about publishing the survey, I also totally get you. I am not at the publishing stage yet, and if anyone were to publish it, it would probably be BVMN itself, actually. That's a conversation I'm hoping to have with them over the coming weeks and months. For now, I'm still parsing out the data.
Thanks, Nikhil! See you later today.
responding to pitch as of: https://github.com/lucypapachristou/Infographic-Project/commit/c2ad72f6b38eaf6d266422f8d840fb60210180aa
Hey Lucy!
First off, great job putting in the work to collect this important data and having the foresight to do so. It was astute to think about asking data-oriented questions as opposed to just enumerating anecdotes, striking and troubling as they may be.
I think your intuition to use percentages is certainly correct. However, I'll just add my two cents of cautioning you against making the data the story. Rather, the data should serve the story.
Given that there seem to be many many subsections of this data that you could present, I'd like to know which you think tells the most compelling narrative? How would you weave them together to tell a story? Looking at the percentages you listed that detail different types of violence, I have to say the most striking number of all is the top-line summary that 93.08% of respondents said they had experienced some form of violence. It may not be so necessary to get into the specific forms that took. It may also be necessary, but you'll have to tell me why it is important that 58% involved a club/stick whereas 33% involved torture (which seems to me extremely high and very much worth exploring.) I think your figures on the context for this violence—where it took place, whether it was disproportionately high among particular nationalities or by gender—may end up serving to help readers better understand what's going on.
All that to say that I'm curious what kind of headline or conclusion you want to give us based on this data. (Another question I have is, how does this rate of violence compare to that within camps? I'm guessing maybe it's higher due to even less infrastructure/protection, and that strikes me as a story potentially worth telling.)
These are just some thoughts and a reminder that it can be tempting when we have a unique and powerful dataset to just present it as-is, but readers will need help interpreting it and fitting it into a story they tell themselves about the world.
I'll mention one other thing (sorry this is getting long). This is certainly outside the scope of our little icon project, but, as you may be aware, surveys are tricky. If you were going to publish the results of this project, you'd have to provide a lot of details. About the context in which people were asked questions, the exact wording of the questions, whether they were asked those questions in their native languages, whether they knew you at that point, and so on. In a case like this where there is basically no data available otherwise, you definitely have more flexibility, but someone would need to vet, for example, whether the questions were asked in a leading way or whether it was possible that they were misinterpreted. Not at all accusing you of any of that, but just mentioning that it's a tricky process that typically involves a lot of oversight.
Thanks for the work on this, look forward to reading more about what you've learned!