This project was carried out for a Digital Humanities class at the University of California, Los Angeles (Winter 2019, Anna Bonazzi - annabonazzi@hotmail.it). Find project files on Github.

This project is based on the data collected by European association UNITED for Intercultural Action, which collects detailed information about migrants found dead on their way to Europe or within European countries. The .cvs file used as a starting point for the project was elaborated by Italian civic-data organization OnData, which extrapolated it from a PDF list published by UNITED.

The data of the UNITED list (3,932 records containing data for 34,361 people between 1993 and May 2018) was processed to expand the original information and extrapolate individual details for each person on the list.

The resulting list, available here, includes the following information: counts of people by gender, with a difference between adults and children; gender; age; origin; cause of death; description of the event; number of “stolen” years; source of the information; country where the person was found, specific location; latitude and longitude (for geolocation), an annotation of whether the death occurred while crossing a border; and a link to a silhouette-like picture.

The main objective guiding data processing and visualization choices for this project was preserving the humanity of people on the list, who are known to us only as piece of data (we often don’t even have their names). This objective determined three main processing and visualization choices:

1. Determining where each person was found
   Information about the precise location where each person was found (such as "in the Evros river" or "near the Polish border") was extrapolated from the general description through regex-based text processing. In cases where the general description allowed for more than one interpretation of the body's location, descriptions highlighting that the body was found at a border were given first priority, since one of the arguments of this project is that the real issue of migration deaths is borders, not individual countries (this project argues that viewing migration problems as disconnected issues of separate countries without significant and responsible coordination across borders partially contributes to these deaths).
   The locations identified with this process were geocoded through a mix of manual and automatic steps (the vague nature of most locations, such as "off the coast of Bouzedjar beach (DZ)", made it impossible to complete the whole process automatically).
   It is important to clarify that many of the geocoded locations visualized on the map are in fact approximations or guesses: when the location provided was too vague to pinpoint the exact place where a body was found (such as "off the coast of Libya"), an educated guess was made based the position of most other people who tried a similar journey or died in nearby locations. Although imprecise, it can be argued that these points still carry some value, as they help us offer something similar to a burial place for the people involved.
2. Extrapolating and classifying the cause of death
   This part was the most delicate: categorizing people by the way they lost their life can be a problem, because it risks reducing their whole life to a few grusome details, further reducing their humanity. However, it also seemed important to do justice to their stories by giving some sort of visibility to their death, which is ultimately the main reason why this list of people comes to the viewer's attention.
   Causes of death were categorized through regex-based text processing and displayed in such a way to express the absurdity and incredible diversity of ways people had to die, to try and remind the viewer that none of these deaths was necessary or justified.
3. Adding personal details such as shadow-like pictures and the count of years each person could still have lived, to remind the viewer of the humanity of the dots on the map in contrast to the absurdity of their death, which as discussed in the Migration Deaths page, is arguably an unnecessary tragedy inextricably connected to EU migration policies.
   The shadow-like pictures were chosen to give a more human appearance to the records of the people on the list, who were displayed both on an interactive map and in a slideshow that presents their names and what is known of their stories. Two criteria guided the choice of the pictures: a) the pictures needed to be neutral enough so as to render the image of the shadow-like person without making them cartoonish or silly; b) there had to be at least some variety among the pictures so as not to create the impression that they were all the same. While full personalization was impossible, different pictures were selected for men, women, boys, girls, babies, unidentified people (an androginous / neutral looking picture was selected in this case) and groups. The choice was also made to extend the label "boy/girl" (as opposed to "man/woman") to people up to and including 19: while the attribution of age-related labels is mostly cultural, it seemed more delicate and more considerate to highlight as much as possible the young age of a majority of the dead.
   The count of the stolen years was inspired by a project that graphically represents gun deaths in the U.S where a counter displays all the years that gun victims could still have lived based on local life expectancy. In our case, records where the age of the deceased person was available were completed with a note on how much longer they could have lived on the basis of average European life expectancy by gender.