Visualizing Suffering: Tracking Photojournalism & The Syrian Refugee Crisis Alejandro Ortega, Robbie Ha, Peilin Lai Faculty Lead: Astrid Giugni, Ph.D., Project Manager: Jessica Hines, Ph.D.

Introduction Data Visualizations Conclusion

On 9/2/2015, three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body was photographed on the shores of j Our data visualizations illustrate that most Syrian refugees are concentrated in Turkey, Turkey’s Mediterranean coast after his family’s overcrowded boat capsized in the Aegean Western and Northern Europe. The visualizations also reflect the established main Sea. corridors of escaping Syria and entering Europe: Turkey and Though the had been festering the previous four and a half years, the escalating refugee crisis was largely neglected by the international community. This image Usage of images of Syrian Refugees by the eight news media outlets is ranked as the brought the crisis to the forefront of international discourse by augmenting the dialogue with following: Fox (202), The Guardian (177), BBC (133), NBC (72), NYT (58), CNN (47), WP a human dimension. (35), WSJ (4). Figure 9 (below) As a result, the fundamental question this project asks is: How has photojournalism in Western media influenced our understanding to the refugee crisis?

We observed notable differences between the number of refugees with the published image Figure 3 (left above): Geographical distribution of the total amount of refugees from 2015 – distribution. Turkey holds the mass majority of Syrian Refugees, yet they’re only third Figure 1 (above) : Google Trends data from June 2015 to May 2017 for ‘European Migrant 2016, data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. among the countries with the most images. Also, Greece has the most number of published Crisis.’ There was a massive surge in popularity for this topic from 8/30/15 to 9/19/15, Figure 4 (right above): Geographical distribution of all the published images that were photos despite not having as many Syrian refugees as its ranked peers. coinciding with the Alan Kurdi photo, before trailing off once again. Source: Google cited by the eight specified news agencies. Objectives This may reflect that photos originating from European countries have a higher likelihood of getting published than those originated from the and other regions.

Using the Associated Press Photograph database, we sought to create data visualizations that communicate which stories have been disseminated by Western news agencies. A 2014 Pew Figure 10 (right): This project Research Center report analyzed media outlets by the political leanings of their readership, culminated in a website medium and the following eight news agencies were chosen by our group to represent the full that displays all of our data political spectrum: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, visualizations in an interactive NBC, CNN, The BBC, The Guardian, and FOX News. platform. Figure 5 (left above): Graph of the top five countries with the most total refugees. Turkey ranks first, with roughly three times more refugees than the next country, Lebanon Methods Figure 6 (right above): Graph depicts the top five countries with the most published photos. Greece ranks first, despite not belonging in the top five countries with the most refugees Future Work • As a baseline, our group used the Google Trends to limit our search on the AP Photograph Database to photos taken between June 2015 and May 2017. The final • Apply our techniques to Reuters and Getty Images to produce a more diversified data set. search queried the term “syrian refugee” during the above timeframe, resulting in 85 • Further research on how images are selected for publication among news media outlets pages and about 5,000 photos. Figure 2 (below) • Find out what tangible quality of a image increases the likelihood it will reach publication (compositional or technical) • Contact more experts in photojournalism about image production, selection and publication

Acknowledge & References • Using the jsoup library and a supplementary python script, we were able to scrape the following: the image URL, the photographer, the caption text, the date the image was taken, the latitude /longitude of the photo’s location, and the AP unique ID. Data+ Group 7 would like to thank the following people: Our Project Manager Jessica • Duplicate images were removed using unique IDs, resulting in a final data set of 3,639 Hines, our Faculty Lead Astrid Giugni, unique images featuring Syrian refugees photographed from June 2015 to May 2017. From the Data+ Program: Paul Bendich, Ashlee Valente, Ariel Dawn, Kathy • We used the jsoup library again to conduct Reverse Google Image searches of all 3,639 Peterson, Rhonda Stanfield images to find articles by the eight news agencies of interest that used these images. Figure 7 (left): The following images are the top cited of the AP Photographer Muhammed Muheisen, for his insight into photographing life and death top five countries with the most published images. We amidst conflict 3,639 total 579 published 650 unique observed that images published from Western European countries often depicted political protests and refugees in images photos articles large groups, while images published from Middle Eastern countries often portrayed individuals and refugee camps • The visualizations in our graphics section of the website were created using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Figure 8 (above): Timeline graph depicting the number of • Finally, a small scale survey was conducted using Google Forms. It has five randomly articles featuring AP images versus time. The Guardian, selected images that were published and five that were not published, and asks BBC, and FOX News have the most articles and the most respondents to gauge the emotional impact of the images and guess whether the image photographs between them. was published.