Portrait of Harbor

A data-driven, interactive work of art illustrating the challenging figures of refugee movement

Overview

Portrait of Harbor is an art piece designed to challenge the way we think about the refugee population. No longer will we just see numbers in the hundreds of thousands or tens of millions, but real data visualizations communicating real problems, and offering steps toward a solution. As the name implies, this piece aims to put a face to the vast number of those who come seeking safety and refuge.

Background

24 days prior to January 20th, 164,000 articles were published that were collected by Google News pertaining to the search term “refugee”. In the 3 weeks since the presidential inauguration about 11,100,000 new articles were returned by the aggregator for the same search term. That’s an increase in content of over 6700% for an average of 462,500 articles being written per day.

Clearly the global public demand for information has increased tremendously. But who can sort through this flood of new material? Such a massive wave of news articles could never be parsed on an individual basis.

Portrait of Harbor is designed to be an interactive art piece that present data in a more accessible way while remaining informative and aesthetic.

Methods

1. Locate and collect data to be used for analysis

• Data for this project was sourced from the UNHCR’s “2015 Global Trends” file.

2. Narrow down the large datasets to target relevant figures for this project

• This step revealed our focus to be on the following countries: Afghanistan, Chad, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey.

3. Clean the data and check for accuracy by cross checking with available resources.
4. Analyze data to track emigration and immigration across selected countries.
5. Develop a system for representing the information visually using size and color as a factor.
6. Design an effective composition.

• Original drawing
• Layer and digitize in Photoshop
• Create stylized country shapes
• Add and arrange to informal geography
• Revise with textures.
• Animate the composition

7. Create actions that reveal informational cards for each country
8. Import re-layer in Adobe Animate
9. Export as HTML

References

1. UNHCR 2015 Global Trends Data: http://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-2015.html

Special Thanks to Blake from CyVerse and Diana Daly from the Univeristy of Arizona School of Information