Which photographs circulate the most in each EU country?

Introduction

Alan Kurdi case made us think about the importance of images as a medium with the power of increasing the attention towards the phenomenon and steering the debate. Since migration affects Europe as a whole we decided to gather a corpus composed by the most relevant and viewed images in every country of the European Union in order to make a thorough synthesis of this phenomenon.

Online news organizations are one of the most relevant source of structured information in Europe and their images, more than others, have the power to influence opinions due to their wide visibility. Looking at Alexa’s rank of the most clicked news organizations we selected two actors for each country and, from these actors, we gathered a corpus of 2.800 images. With this corpus the aim was to find common characteristics and analogies in the content.

Image rank: 1

Protocol

^1.We followed this sequence to clean up our csv

How to read it

The patchwork shows only images that recur at least three times in the corpus. The more an image recurs in the corpus the bigger it is on the chart. In addition we put images with same content close together and the user can decide if he/she wants to see them separated or not.

Findings

At first glance we can say that there were several groups of images that recur in different actors. The interesting fact is that there are different groups that refers to the same event and, even in group that aren’t linked to the same event, it is possible to find recurring elements. This finding shifted a little our perspective: in the beginning we were looking only for single images that had a big impact by themselves, while from these observations we realized that maybe it was worth to take a closer look to the event or element depicted rather than the image itself.

Data

Timestamp: 27/11/2015 - 30/11/2015

Data source: Google Images, Alexa

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