I had been thinking a lot about images in journalism and communication a lot recently when a friend (who is involved with the group “Health Providers Against Poverty”) shared a Toronto Star article about the number of First Nations communities living in an official “state of emergency”. The article did an impressive investigation into a number of crucial infrastructure, health, and environmental failures that have, for the most part, been neglected by the national government and mainstream media, some for many years. It’s quite effective, with both quantitative, qualitative, and anecdotal evidence; however, it concludes with a long list of all the States of Emergency declared between 2010–16 is. It’s great to have all the stats listed, but it was really hard for me to get a sense from this big list of text of where these communities are, and which crises are ongoing, so I started to make an infographic that better communicated these stats.
It’s viewable here:
Alternately, here’s the image-only (non-interactive) graphic that I started with, if you’re experiencing any difficulties with the above.
Working on it (which involved exploring new boundaries of my far-from-perfect coding abilities), I faced more decisions than I expected to. Despite an aesthetic of objectivity, many subjective choices go into constructing an infographic. As just one example, I opted (after deliberation) to not allow filtering of incidents by criteria of “ongoing” and “resolved”. To me, the risk seemed too great that it would incorrectly imply that previous crises has been satisfactorily and permanently resolved — when, in actuality, many areas may be at risk for recurrence, and in fact may not even have been properly attended to at all (laws in some provinces cause the status of “state of emergency” to “expire” after a certain duration). While I think this is the right choice, it is certainly a subjective one.
The rhetoric of the infographic should certainly be approached with skepticism. The necessary simplification of data in the name of readability streamlined design brings the risk of stripping away bigger truths. Moving a cursor over an image is not activism or even necessarily awareness. Even worse, “interactivity” can be a slippery slope in which social issues are “gamified” for the voyeuristic benefit of a viewer privileged enough to be removed from situations of crisis.
In spite of this, we are living in this era of information saturation in which competition for human attention is increasingly aggressive. Any means by which access to information and engagement with social issues can be increased is worth pursuing, so long as it comes with the due diligence of recognizing that each clean point on a graphic represents a messy reality of a community living at an untenable crisis point. These crises aren’t remote, unreachable; they are embedded all throughout Canada and deserve both attention and response.
If you would like to have additional data or resources to add to the graphic, or thoughts on the above, please be in touch.
