visual language / 2020

nov 23 2020

big concept

I am developing my project to visualize the war in the horn of Africa right now. There is a lot of suspicious intentions from the Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Tigray governmental leaders and i think it would be very important to show what little information is presented to the world through social media and anectodal reports.

resources i am collecting: ARE.NA

nov 16 2020

i slightly changed my area of interest. There’s currently a tragic war in east africa that has led to mass migration of Ethiopian refugees entering Sudan.This war began almost 2 weeks ago and has escalated very quickly involving neighboring country Eritrea which was attacked just this past weekend.I want to show a visualization of the impacts of this war. The biggest challenge will be finding confirmed data. Communication in Ethiopia is shut down and many people cannot reach their families.I am imagining telling this stoy using rough data to visualize what is happening right now.

Here is my attempt at a map visualization on observable:

I tried to make a map of Africa using unpkg.com/world-atlas. I’m still gettng used to the syntax on observable so it was pretty tricky to use but felt like a good start! Click the photo to see the observable page.

resources i am collecting: ARE.NA

nov 9 2020

i am interested in creating data visualization about Habesha communities. This term refers to people that are from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There is very little public data and recognition of Habesha people. With potential for civil war in Ethiopia circulating the news, i felt this would be a topic i want to explore

i coded data that i found from the 2015 US census to find out how many people in the US were born in Ethiopia and Eritrea. I wrote some simple data in JSON to upload to observable. My next step is to create a visualization with the accumilated data that i find.

nov 2 2020

INSPO

NEW YORK TIMES INTERACTIVE STORY

an interesting way to give context around systemic and institutional racism using a mix of factual data and personal narrative.

data source: Redlining data, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, analysis of census data showing the loss of majority black neighborhood over the last 50 years

methodology: evaluating data to make sense of an anecdotal story that represents a large population of black homelessness in L.A.

visual: photographs that turn into outlined sketches, colorful graphs, moving images along with the scroll

storytelling: personal story with suggested facts to provide a wider context to understanding homelessness

question to answer: How have racist policies lead to homelessness in LA

other NYTimes interactive stories that i enjoyed

The Boondocks
I love this show because of it’s visual storytelling. The animation feels like traditional anime and i have never seen black people animated in this way. The topics in the show uses humour to challenge social issues in the black community. this method of storytelling is very exciting for me!