Background
EYE CHART FOR HATE
Context
Individual project for "Data as Material" class.
2021/04
Approach
Desktop Research,
Data collection and visualization
Overview
A website visualizing the visibility of tweets on AAPI hate crime in the form of an eye chart. It explores how social media can help reveal data that federal report doesn't show about Anti-Asian Hate Crime.
Tool Used
P5.js
Octoparse
Twitter API
Recently, as COVID-19 has been spreading dramatically across the United States, hate crimes against Asian Americans have been surging (Cabanatuan, 2020; Gover, Harper, & Langton, 2020; Jeung, 2020). The surge is largely indicated by “hate incidents” reported in mass media and spurred by the current social and political climate in which COVID-19 has been repeatedly labeled as “Chinese virus” or “China virus.” According to a report released by The Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council and Chinese for Affirmative Action recently, “more than 2,100 anti-Asian American hate incidents related to COVID-19 were reported across the country over a three-month time span between March and June.
The following contents contain images of violence and blood!
There were mutual-aid communities like Stop AAPI Hate that stood united against racism and hate against Asian American Pacific Islander communities on social media. Despite that, the Asian Hate Crimes never stopped. They appeared on social media and faded out of sight very fast.
In order to raise the awareness of the unseen Asian Hate Crime, and criticize the exposure-driven social media, I extracted tweets with keywords like "AAPI Hate Crime", "Asian Hate Crime" using Octoparse, and then sorted them in the order of the number of likes to make the tweets into an eye chart.
I use the blurred purple circles as the focal point on the eye chart to represent the bruise on our Asian bodies. And as you hover your cursor onto the "C"s in the eye chart, you can see the corresponding tweet content.
Concept
There were mutual-aid communities like Stop AAPI Hate that stood united against racism and hate against Asian American Pacific Islander communities on social media. Despite that, the Anti-Asian Hate Crimes never stopped. They appeared on social media and faded out of sight very fast. Meanwhile, the federal report of Anti-Asian Hate Crime lacks data because they does not collect hate crime statistics from local prosecutors or courts, and victims of hate crimes are often unlikely to report to the police. Instead, they turned to social media and the people around them.
In order to raise the awareness of the unseen Asian Hate Crime, and criticize the exposure-driven social media, I extracted tweets with keywords like "AAPI Hate Crime", "Anti-Asian Hate Crime", using Octoparse, and then sorted them in the order of the number of likes to make the tweets into an eye chart.
I use the blurred purple circles as the focal point on the eye chart to represent the bruise on our Asian bodies. And as you hover your cursor onto the "C"s in the eye chart, you can see the corresponding tweet content.