Overcrowded Boats
Text Analysis, Mapping
During the first boat wave of Vietnamese refugees, articles frequently used numbers to report boat arrivals and narrate voyage experiences from Vietnam to Australia. However, as numbers are often associated with facts and statistics, it strips away the emotion attached to these traumatic experiences out at sea. Thus, my intention is to express numbers with emotion.
This graph draws comparisons on the number of refugees on each boat that ranges in length. The letter ‘I’ represents a single Vietnamese and can be read as a roman numeral for ‘1’ or as a pronoun to speak of one’s experiences and emotions.
The density of these squares visualises the limited space for each individual during their boat voyage, expressing the desperation despite conditions and risks of death at sea in hope to find refuge. This pun reminds the viewers that refugees are people who have gone through hardship and fear, despite being treated as statistics.
Data was collated and interpreted from a corpus. The corpus was created for this project and includes articles during the period of the first boat wave of Vietnamese refugees from the Sydney Morning Herald archives.
