My project is inspired by the tragic events that have been taking place at the Mediterranean Sea during the past decade. I wanted a way to visualize numbers of migrants crossing through the Mediterranean and numbers of migrants’ death while critically examining the causes and triggers of such high numbers. For this reason, I chose to go for a scroll-based narrative visualization to explore the data numbers and events side-by-side.

I used data from the International Organisation for Migration’s (IOM) Missing Migrants project. There are data for two dimensions:

Data for years starting 2016 to 2019 was available in an Excel format on the Missing Migrants website. The data contained information on migration by sea and by land: Arrivals to Malta, Cyprus, Italy and Spain, as well as interceptions and deaths at sea. I only used the arrivals data from this spreadsheet, since the interception data was not available for the years 2014 and 2015

Data from 2014 and 2015 was obtained from the Mediterraneans arrivals dashboard from the unhcr website: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205 I summed the number of arrivals for each year and each arrival country by toggling the dropdown

The initial data was obtained from the Missing Migrants project website. The data was in an excel format representing one incident at sea by row. I then filtered the data by routes (Central, Eastern and Western Mediterranean) and summed the incident by category.