Narrative techniques in The list
How a data-driven article by The Guardian sheds light to thousands of deaths of refugees and migrants
The data-driven article It’s 34,361 and rising: how the List tallies Europe’s migrant bodycount was first published on 20 June 2018 in the print edition of The Guardian as well as on their website.
Mode, audience and genre
The article is multimodal: although it’s text-based, it uses visual components such as data visualisations and photographs. It evolves around a PDF-list which documents the death of 34,361 refugees and migrants. After the first few paragraphs, an info box is included to explain briefly what the list is about and how the data has been collected.
The story falls into the genre of data journalism, using the angles scale and change. Both visualisations have interactive elements. They unfold and change as the reader is scrolling down. One consists of 34,361 dots — one for each recorded death. Different colors categorize the location of the death: while travelling overland, at sea or within the EU.
When reading the article, it is expected from the audience to have some knowledge about refugees leaving their countries to come to Europe. Since the article was written in 2018, three years after the beginning of the European migrant crisis, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with it.
In the first paragraph a scene is described: A search and rescue operation is pulling bodies — dead and alive — out of the sea, close to Italian territorial waters. As I was reading these lines, I immediately thought about what is happening right now, refugees coming to Europe via the Mediterranean, often having to be rescued after getting into distress at sea. But then, in the next paragraph, the narrator unravels that the described scene actually already happened in 1997, surprising the reader with the turn that scenes like this have been happening for the past 20 years with the only changes being origin and route of the refugees.
Moreover, it can be assumed that the audience is supposed to be based somewhere in Europe. All of the presented NGOs, projects, policies and characters are connected to European countries.
(Nameless) refugees as key characters
The narrator is effaced. The authors of the article, Niamh McIntyre and Mark Rice-Oxley, describe the events without being present themselves. Niko Kommenda and Pablo Gutiérrez have also been involved in the story by creating the graphics.
Throughout the story, a range of different characters is introduced. The main characters are the refugees as such who are trying to come to Europe for the past 20 years and specifically the 34,361 men, women and children who have died on their way.
For most of the article, they stay abstract and unnamed— also because, as the narrator says, many of them do not get identified. Their story cannot be told because it remains unknown. It is only in the second half of the article that two of them are given a name and a story: Oumar Dansokho, 25 years old from Guinea who set himself alight after being denied asylum in Belgium and Manuel Bravo who hang himself in a detention center in Bedfordshire, so that his son, now a minor without a parent, could not be deported. Three others are briefly named and not given a story to their name other than that they died after being deported from Europe.
Another character is introduced in the beginning of the story. It’s the Dutch NGO United for Intercultural Action who has collected the names and stories of thousands of people who died on their way to Europe. This character is especially important for the story because without it, the story couldn’t be told as there wouldn’t be any numbers to report on. Other characters are experts in their field who explain the method of the NGO or European policies that influenced migration flows.
Movement through migration flows
The migration flows are essential to the setting and therefore movement of the story. Throughout the article, a number of settings and places are introduced. They all have one thing in common: They are places where refugees have died after leaving their home country to come to Europe.
The movement between the settings also illustrates how the situation has changed over time: at first, the Refugees came to Europe over the Adriatic, then the Mediterranean and then, when a new policy to encourage African countries to stop people making the journey to Europe was introduced, the deaths in Europe halved while those in Africa increased during the same period of time. Apart from the sea, the asylum process, detention centres, prisons and camps are named as death places.
A scrollable map is integrated in the article to illustrate how the location of the deaths shifted over time.
The why
The point of the article is to shed light to the thousands of people who have died on their way to Europe and their stories as far as they can be told. By reporting the total number of deaths it creates another level of urgency and relevance as opposed to reporting many individual cases. But it also emphasizes that refugees coming to Europe isn’t a new phenomenon.
What could have been different?
The story could have been made more personal by presenting more individual refugees and their stories. But since there is also an additional article published on the same day that puts faces and stories to the victims, this is probably why they don’t appear in this story. Moreover, the story is mainly focussing on the number and place of deaths. It’s only briefly touching upon what can be done to prevent more deaths in the future.
What I have learned
It’s 34,361 and rising: how the List tallies Europe’s migrant bodycount is a good example for how visualisations effectively illustrate and accompany written text, giving more context. Sometimes it can just make you realise how big a number really is. Sometimes looking at the 34,361 dots can give you an oppressive feeling, knowing each of them stands for one death.
Regarding my own work, I want to integrate data visualisations that not only add value to the story, but can also make the reader stop and think for a minute. It’s my aim to combine data with personal stories and characters, so that they give more relevance and depth to the story. Because I think, after all, the individual stories are the ones that stick in one’s mind.
