Archetypes in the making

Which aspects of the migration phenomenon do actors tend to privilege when talking about it? What language do they use?

Introduction

After a thorough observation of our 2.800 images corpus, we noticed the presence of recurrences in the representation of some topics. Assuming that it was not only a fortuity, we wanted to investigate more deeply the phenomenon by focusing on the quantity and the content of images. Since the images in news sites aren’t isolated realities, but rather always associated with a text, the next step was to have a closer look also on the language used in the articles these images were placed in.The fact that the images in question were similar in subject and composition made us wondering if there was a correspondence in the language.

Protocol

1.Archetypes grouping

2.We have considered only the photos with the highest rank for each actor

3.We followed this sequence to clean up our csv

How to read it

For each recurring situation it has been created an animated gif that shows the images of the groups; This gif is placed alongside a tag cloud showing the most used words associated with the archetype. The graphs below show the percentage of use of the word refugee (blue) compared to migrant (yellow) and vice versa. The base of each triangle represents the number of actors involved, while the x-axis represents the percentage values related to the use of the two words. The two percentages were later investigated within each group in an effort to cluster behaviors.

The overall rates of each group were combined to see similarities and differences; once again the base of the triangles represents the number of actors involved while the height represents the percentage of use of the two terms. The last part of the visualization shows the behavior of the most interesting actors in the use of the two terms throughout the recurring situations.

Findings

In all the tag clouds, the two terms refugee and migrant emerge among the top positions. In particular, refugee is always the most used word, except in the group "children's crossing", which gives way to the word border. It’s important to notice that this word has a certain relevance in the photos representing the journey, the barbed wired and the train. We also noticed that depending on the situation, different Eu countries appear to be more relevant, in particular: Hungary, Germany and Serbia when it comes to depicting the journey on the road, the border and the use of trains; Greece and Italy when it comes to depicting the journey made by sea. Denmark stands out as a particular case, popping up in second place in the group “walking together".

Looking at the usage of the words refugee and migrant in different groups, we can observe that a lot of actors decided to use only one of the two terms, preferring refugee over migrant in every case except in the group related to the boat. By comparing the total percentage of the 11 groups, we can see that in all cases the word refugee is greater than migrant. The two cases in which the distance between the two terms is minimal are “children's crossing” and “the boat”.

Analyzing the behavior of individual actors we noticed some interesting facts:

  • there are actors who only use the word refugee, in particular both news sites from Belgium
  • there are fewer actors who only use the word migrant
  • some actors use much the word "migrant" than refugee
  • in “the invasion" there are actors that use equally the two words
  • in "the barbed wire" there are players who use only the word migrant

Data

Timestamp: 06/12/2015 - 08/12/2015

Data source: Google Images, Alexa

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