Syrian Refugee Crisis, Photojournalism, and Social Media (Tutorial)

Refugees Welcome

Description:

This is a research-project-centered tutorial that will build on a Summer 2017 Data+ project (http://bigdata.duke.edu/projects/visualizing-suffering-tracking-photojournalism-and-syrian-refugee-crisis). Students must receive permission to enroll in the course and they are required to work as part of a team towards building a term project.

Constructing their own research questions, students will analyze how photographic images of the Syrian Refugee Crisis distributed via media outlets, how local as well as national news outlets report on the Crisis, and how narrative is shaped by visual media.

A potential area of focus is how photojournalistic images are altered, repurposed, and reinterpreted through social media. Ultimately, the participating students will be required to develop their own research questions as part of a team. Group work and project management are an integral part of the course. This tutorial will help students think through questions surrounding the links between visual and textual interpretation, copyrights problems, and ethics. The data analysis component of the project will ask students to learn how to use image search software and construct a visualization of their results.