The Refugee Project
This project is aimed at exploring the European Refugee Crisis (ERC) utilising data visualisation, specifically looking at the movements of refugees and performing sentiment analysis and natural language processing of Twitter data and UK media articles. We have found that the recent European Refugee Crisis has not only been impactful in its sheer scale, but in the ways in which the media press coverage worked as an element in shaping public discourses and reactions towards the crisis. Moreover, we have observed that there were rapid shifts in these discourses especially surrounding terrorist attacks in Europe such as the London Bridge attack and the Manchester arena bombing. We will thus use Twitter data and UK articles to explore how press coverage of these attacks have changed social media sentiment towards the ERC.
Based on these aims, our main research question is: “How can we use data visualization to analyze the language used by British newspapers and Twitter users to describe the European Refugee Crisis?” The following pages of our website cover our motivations, literature review, hypotheses, methods, visualizations, and analyses of our project.
Hypotheses
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In regards to the role of the media, we have various hypotheses based on our initial researches and the literature review on the next page.
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High levels of incoming refugees to Europe will correlate with high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK news outlets.
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Events of terrorist attacks in Europe will correlate with high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK news outlets.
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Twitter sentiment analysis results will correlate with those of UK news outlets
Background to the European Refugee Crisis
The European Refugee Crisis started in 2015 as more than a million refugees started migrating into Europe, mainly to Turkey and Albania (BBC News, 2019). There were multiple causes to the surge in refugees in 2015, some key causes being asylum seekers from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan and economic migrants.
It was estimated in 2015 that the number of arrivals to Italy, Greece, and Spain was 1,015,078 refugees, with the number significantly dropping after 2015, with 20,120 arriving in September 2018 (BBC News, 2019). A large portion of refugees have been arriving to the above three countries due to their proximity to the sea and thus presented for relatively easier access to the incoming refugees. However, the number of incoming refugees should be understood in conjunction to the number of asylum applicants for their better reflection of which country the refugees actually end up settling into.
As for the United Kingdom, it accounted for only 7% of the total number of first time asylum applicants in the third quarter of 2018, with Germany (29%) and France (19%) accounting for the highest percentages (Refugees, 2019). From 2014 to 2017, the United Kingdom accepts the fifth most refugees in among countries in the EU.
Note: The scale of the circle are is not constant across years and countries.
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Please be mindful of the legend and check for what population each size of circle represents.
The UNHCR reveals that 85% of all refugees are hosting in developing countries rather than the developed ones (Refugees, 2019). Such data shows that the UK has proportionately received less refugees over the years compared to other European countries, which is visually presented in the interactive map below. However, the press coverages and media reactions seem to be booming than ever. The following parts of our website will explore these findings, specifically looking at how the social media (Twitter) and press coverages of the ERC have influenced the overall media discourses regarding this topic.
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As a response to this crisis, UNHCR and other organisations have engaged in “large scale media advocacy exercises” in order to convince European countries to help (Orca.cf.ac.uk, 2019). This exercise had not only brought European countries’ attention to the crisis but had set “the tone” and dramatically increased attention to the ERC in 2015. Moreover, the media did not only pay attention to statistics of the ERC, but to the side effects of the crisis. These side effects included parliament laws on asylum decisions, employment, safety, and other various policies related to the ERC.
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Literature
Our literature review confirms that media discourse surrounding the ERC evolved over time. It is also a consensus that different parties from various political spectrums have used the ERC in order to achieve a public discourse of their preference that will bring them political benefits.
However...
There are variances regarding the language used to refer to migrants and regarding the impact of the media in shaping public discourses across Europe.
UK Focus
Because the UK was reported to have the most negative media coverage of the ERC and due to the abundance of big data based in the UK, we have decided to scope our project down to the UK which will help us to be more specific while staying relative to our research question.
Goal
Our project will, therefore, aim to validate some of our findings in the literature review and possibly fill some of the gaps that currently exist regarding the topic through data analysis and visualizations.
In 2017, the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide came at a record rate of 44,400 every day (UNHCR, 2017)
You may have heard that civilisation is living in its most peaceful period of existence, but over the last decade, global peace has been increasingly threatened with conflicts arising in the EMEA region. Seven civil wars have been started in the past decade alone, from regions like Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Central African Republic, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine. Many more were started before the turn of the decade and are still unresolved, such as the Turkish and Somalian civil wars.
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This also does not consider other conflicts, like the Israel-Palestine that is still taking lives and displacing families today.
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The increasing connectivity of the world, coupled with a growing deterioration of peace of the last decade, has seen refugee numbers more than double compared to just a decade ago.
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Here is a timeline of global refugees, including internally-displaced persons. The graph includes timelines of some wars and conflicts, but note that it is by no means an exhaustive list of global wars and conflicts. The displayed conflicts are included to provide some context to certain trends, and they are conflicts that affect significant number of populations, but again they are not exhaustive and not the sole explanatory reason for the trends seen in the number of refugees.
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