Data visualizations and infographics are powerful tools in creating and communicating new perspectives on complex issues. And the refugee crisis has inspired a whole range of such tools, as designers, researchers and the media try to make sense of what happening. Here follows a brief and by no means exhaustive overview of visual guides, maps, bar diagrams, flow charts and more.
The Refugee Project is a ‘temporal map of refugee migrations since 1975’, drawn up on the basis of UN-compiled data. Designed by New York-based Hyperakt (hyperakt.com), the map visualizes refugee volumes over time, and includes historical information that explains the social and political events that forced major refugee movements.
A similar exercise in providing an historical overview of refugee movements in map form with accompanying diagrams of flows and connections, is called Flight & Expulsion, developed at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Unfortunately, the timeline ends in 2008.
In the magazine New World, researchers Nikol Sander and Ramon Bauer distinguish between stock data (the number of migrants residing in a country) and flow data (the movement of people over a defined period). With internet designers Null2, they offer an overview of international migration flows in the period 1990-2010 in easy-to-read diagrams that represent the relative size and direction of migration movements around the world
A series of charts that analyzes the 2015 movement of migrants into Europe was recently presented by the BBC website as part of its Migrant Crisis series. The charts visualize where migrants come from, where they are going, how they get to Europe, the number of asylum claims per country, the number of migrants detected entering the EU illegally, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean by month, the migrant quotas set by each country, and the number of asylum applications approved.
In September last year, Time magazine published a series of graphics to capture the extent of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Up-to-date maps with related bar charts that present the latest statistics and developments are offered on the UNHCR website. There are maps of areas such as the Mediterranean and of specific countries such as Syria, as well as links to reports on the work of the UN and other bodies.
Lastly, the subjective nature of data visualization and how it affects our perception of an issue such as migration is the subject of Seeing Data, a research project led by the University of Sheffield and Migration Observatory Oxford
Top photo: The Refugee Project