Visualizing Suffering: Tracking Photojournalism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Collaboration with Jessica Hines. (Summer 2017)
This project considers the following questions: what does suffering look like? How do images inspire compassion for the suffering of others? And what are the social and political valences of the representation of suffering?
To address these questions, our students analyzed the visual representation of one of the largest humanitarian crises in history—the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Since the onset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, images of Syrian refugees fleeing violence and political upheaval have proliferated world-wide. Photographs such as that of the young Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, lying lifeless on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, or of Omran Daqneesh, a Syrian boy, bloodied and covered in dust after an airstrike in Aleppo, were circulated by the New York Times, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Times of India. Despite the widespread distribution of these images, however, there are some notable gaps. Russia’s Pravda, the premier Russian language news site, published neither image, and China’s People’s Daily, the official state newspaper of China, published Omran Daqneesh’s image, but not Alan Kurdi’s. These gaps underscore the ways news outlets choose which images to use in order to represent the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Pravda, the People’s Daily, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times all carefully curate their visual representation of the Crisis.
Three undergraduate students in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics studied the distribution of images in European and American news outlets. Click here for a summary of their project.
An article resulting from this project is forthcoming at Kairos.
Data+ poster session
Reunion dinner