COUNTING (or not)
some voices here: https://conf.domainepublic.net/DifficultAnimalsSkateFerociously
"Critical practices of listing, naming, filtering, tool making, care and sharing require that some books are kept." (Bureacracksy call)
"If the death of over 40,000 people does not wake up Europe’s conscience, what will?" (UNITED)
"IOM is committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society." (Organization for Migration (IOM))
"I will now tackle the unquestioned question reiterated by the disregard for lives lost in the streets of the US and in the Mediterranean Sea: Why don't black lives matter?" (Denise Ferreira da Silva)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Proposal:
Difference between two documents. Angry accounting vs attempts to be/appear orderly.
'List of 36 570 documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of "Fortress Europe"'. A pdf is quite different than a dataset?
Links from Hans:
https://agirpourlapaix.be/20-06-19-saytheirnames-lecture-publique-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/banu-cennetoglu-interview-turkish-artist-the-list-europe-migrant-crisis
https://www.frieze.com/article/list-thousands-refugee-deaths-liverpool-destroyed-again
Listing is the first/minimal gesture.
To make visible. Orderly discounting ...
UNITED counts more deaths (including suicides, ...) what not to count. Not considered good/scientific quality.
An activist listing. Costly 'prikkeldraad' ... one meter per person on the list. Used in visualisations.
UNITED not releasing the dataset upfront. You can ask for it?
is the disturbing because of the reduction to people to a database?
It is important to start counting ... to document, knowing you cannot be complete.
statistician working on conflict zones. Trying to prove how many people disappeared/got killed
Elo: difficult to look at the lists, there are deaths less validated than others. What number is deemed unnacceptable. The list grows, and we still go in another direction.
Hans: documenting vs counting
These lists should not stay that way. An evidence, trace of what has happened
Dia: it is flat, but it hints at a narrative that is not told.
Hans: way it is inviting storytelling on single database lines. Ref. holocaust: to put a face on a number.
Elo: was there already a list?
Hans: investigating German bureaucracy around it. Flipping the list.
Future oriented and trace oriented lists.
Hans: what does it mean to be even counted. Irak: US thought to get away without body counts.
Dia: airwars -- Syria + Irak.
Hans: "to create accountability". More than listing; trying to find witnesses to verify. In dialogue with military.
Dia: make comparisons between strikes ... bureacratic battle around accountability.
Are they neutral?
Hans: they are political. It is not endless/useless. It is a way to counter violence, by making sure it leaves traces.
Dia: airwars combines stories, images, data.
Hans: comparing syria with irak. Creating accountability. A 'journalistic neutrality'. There is vision.
Dia: possibility of referencing.
Hans: Method of IOM is creating an objectivity, to create facts. Why and how you create facts. It is easier for governments to deny UNITED list.
Looking more reliable because it hides its anger?
Hans: IOM has a double face. An effort from government to show it is not as bad as UNITED presents it. It makes it harder to deny.
Ambiguous.
Dia: filtering data ... looking for data, filtered by for example: shot by ...
Elo: make what is going on, known. Is that the case? Are those tables giving new knowledge? Reading it is tough ... it might make a change? The need to prove your humanity and it should not have ... This move of proving your existence as equal to someone else. How many years, how many spreadsheets.
Hans: difference between historical (holocaust, slavery). Current/ongoing lists are about making it undeniable, to/for governments. Making it an undeniable reality. To create realities.
Dia: from the facts, create a reality that can have an impact.
Elo: The shift that happens with police brutality. It was said, but no possibility to prove it. Rodney King: there is proof, clearly; it is a fact but nothing changed. I wonder looking at social media ... seeing the man die, why do I need to circulate/see this image.
Hans: feeling that it does not matter. There is disturbance around it. It is a power struggle, to actually change things. To show that many refugees are coming, can also work in the opposite direction. There is no easy strategy.
Hans: How do you make things worthwile, not just as a number. For who is it worthwile? Sometimes you need to use their methods.
https://www.frieze.com/article/list-thousands-refugee-deaths-liverpool-destroyed-again
Hans: When you try to present something as a fact, it is a contested object. The why is not so hard to imagine?
Dia: can't stop looking at the dataset.
Telling a story in neutral language. Some are very short. Different voices. Some concise, brief. Others more detailed. Freezing a moment. Addressing fear in the database. Each row is a long documentary on its own. How to get to a more indepth story. Also see it as one among many. From the incident to the larger. Combining. To navigate between detail and list. Interpretation. Violent accident. Personifaction.
Hans: looking up people.
p. 17: 24/04/17 | 28 | N.N. (incl 2 ch.; 6 women; 8 men) | Syria, Cameroon, Congo | 16 drowned when boat sank off Lesbos (GR); 12 missing, 2 rescued | Rel/News24/ChAfrica -> Baris Yazgi -
(From Gent, he's not from Syria but from Turkey)
It was no accident that it started in 1993, Black Sunday. illegal <--> legal aliens.
No border camps
Nationstate.
Lists of migrants moving back?
Family visits
Deported -- there is a list. (UNITED) but also nationstate
Families being spread, bureaucracy fixes people to places.
regroupement - de-grouping
it takes years. also, paying for smugglers.
bureaucratic systems around birth and death and nationality?
sometimes it is better not to know?
not a general duty to document. Human rights demands 'right to life'.
shouldn't you know? a duty to control force. Responsibility to know.
deniability of responsibility. Europe not responsibility. Where is death of migrant registered. Making sure they do not arrive, or they die out of territorial waters. Outsourcing of border control.
money traces -- beyond shock of death
if you use this data to campaign, you need to filter, visualise
interpretation
a column for who shot, 'who did it', 'what did it'? the issue of transparency.
no space for real accountability?
getting behind those figures, there is stuff like that to be done. It looks like the problem is elsewhere.
"Deaths are listed if they can be attributed to the fatal policies of "Fortress Europe" (borderclosure, asylum laws, accommodation, detention policy, deportations, carrier sanctions...)
= missing column?
region of event, de-nationalized. Again, counter-accountability-counting
one line ... one incident ... strong
https://migration.iom.int/sites/all/themes/fmp/pages/heatmap/matrix.php
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Texts in folder 'Counting' https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/iB47HnRSm7HdXby
Katherine Mckittrick, Mathematics Black Life
- Worn out, bill of sale produced, certified to be free, ordinary wench, proved to be the property of, formerly slave to, formerly the property of, all with parenthetic possessors. New world blackness arrives through the ordinary, proved, former, certified, nearly worn-out archives of ledgers, accounts, price tags, and descriptors of economic worth and financial probability. The list of slaves upon these ships is a list of propertied commodities. The slave is possession, proved to be property. Yet a voice interrupts: says she.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace, Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove
- This problem with forms of equality that only balance out within a binary is an issue that we need black feminist calculus to address. For example, what happens when our community rejects binary gender forms, when we reject validated state forms of recognition, when we don’t have access to contemporary digital forms of cultural capital, when the funding in the technology field generally goes to established mainstream organizations controlled by white folks, men, and straight folks, when as organizers of the project we refuse to conform to being either 501(c)3 nonprofit organization or a traditional documentary film project? Equations like the one above beg the mathematician to ask the question: Who does the existing relationship work for? What brings balance on both sides of the equation in the current paradigm?
Denise Ferreira da Silva, 1 (life) / 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value
- [A]s a tool of modern knowledge, the category of blackness figures the operation of efficient and formal causes (that is, anatomic forms and organic processes) in the production of a racial subject destined to obliteration. Efficient and formal causes are conjoined in Kant's account of knowledge and the figuring of reality, which is putatively a philosophical presentation of Newton's natural philosophy. In it, the world becomes an effect, that is, the result of determination -- of judgements or decisions reached by the pure intuitions and the categories of the understanding, that is, the tools available to the mind to access the Truth of the things of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Migrants Files
https://www.themigrantsfiles.com/
'DISCONTINUED ON JUNE 24, 2016 - Events during which someone died trying to reach or stay in Europe'
counting / stop counting
google docs
Open Data
The Missing Migrant Project
https://missingmigrants.iom.int/
Missing Migrants Project data is used to inform target 10.7.3 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the "number of people who died or disappeared in the process of migration towards an international destination." (follow up from The Migrant Files?)
"IOM is committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society."
The count excludes migrant deaths which do not occur during migratory journeys. This means deaths that occur in immigration detention facilities, during deportation, or after forced return to a migrant’s homeland, as well as deaths more loosely connected with migrants’ irregular status, such as those resulting from labor exploitation are not included in the Missing Migrants Project dataset. Migrants who die or go missing after they are established in a new home are also not included in the data, so deaths in refugee camps or housing are excluded. The deaths of internally displaced persons who die within their country of origin are also excluded. This approach is chosen because deaths that occur at physical borders and during migration help to inform about the risks and dangers migrants face during the journey along different migration routes. Data and knowledge of the risks and vulnerabilities faced by migrants in destination countries, including deaths, should not be neglected, but rather tracked as a distinct category.
organised by incident, not by person?
https://missingmigrants.iom.int/MMP-data-collection-guidelines
The List (seems to be based on MMP -> this is project ongoing since 1993 by an activist network UNITED: http://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/about-the-campaign/about-the-united-list-of-deaths/) check relation between both lists (OIM does NOT refer to the UNITED list at all?! No, but the OIM counting is a reaction to several NGO counting projects. The OIM does also exclude several deaths UNITED includes, like suicides in refugee centres, deaths during expulsion, ...).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2018/06/19/TheList.pdf
More recent version: http://www.unitedagainstracism.org/blog/2020/06/19/updated-refugee-death-list-2020/
Death by policy: "If the death of over 40,000 people does not wake up Europe’s conscience, what will?"
On the public use of this list:
https://agirpourlapaix.be/20-06-19-saytheirnames-lecture-publique-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/banu-cennetoglu-interview-turkish-artist-the-list-europe-migrant-crisis
https://www.frieze.com/article/list-thousands-refugee-deaths-liverpool-destroyed-again
"The installation, which names 34,361 dead asylum seekers and migrants, was torn down last month by unknown vandals. The Liverpool Biennial reinstated it following its destruction in July, before it was attacked again on Sunday. The motives and perpetrators remain unclear."
Acquire Obtain the data, whether from a file on a disk or a source over a network.
Parse Provide some structure for the data’s meaning, and order it into categories.
Filter Remove all but the data of interest.
Mine Apply methods from statistics or data mining as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.
Represent Choose a basic visual model, such as a bar graph, list, or tree.
Refine Improve the basic representation to make it clearer and more visually engaging.
Interact Add methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible.
https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/
"humane and orderly dataviz"
Reading on troubled/troubling data (and the need for other ways of counting/validating):
- Katherine Mckittrick, Mathematics Black Life
Worn out, bill of sale produced, certified to be free, ordinary wench, proved to be the property of, formerly slave to, formerly the property of, all with parenthetic possessors. New world blackness arrives through the ordinary, proved, former, certified, nearly worn-out archives of ledgers, accounts, price tags, and descriptors of economic worth and financial probability. The list of slaves upon these ships is a list of propertied commodities. The slave is possession, proved to be property. Yet a voice interrupts: says she.
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace, Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, 1 (life) / 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value
Missing data (or not?)
- there is interesting work around (missing) open data and feminicides in south-america, for example see the work of Helena Suarez: https://www.academia.edu/36952139/Vibrant_maps_Exploring_the_reverberations_of_feminist_digital_mapping
and also Chiara Bernardi: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328463198_Digital_Dust_and_Visual_Narratives_of_Feminicidios
Or on a more institutional side, check the project Missing Numbers: https://missingnumbers.org
[ https://www.centreforpublicdata.org/ We believe that the power to not collect data is one of the most important and little-understood sources of power that states have.]
- On the statistical use of even incomplete lists of victims to estimate casualties:
https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ (in this case of violence by the police in the US, but the method is used for several conflict zones)
https://paolocirio.net/work/obscurity/
Open Data, or not
Re-iterating violence, or not
when these lives mattered, or not
the promise of "transparency"
'N/N' vs. onbekende soldaat
watch/witness
Quantification. The age of the curves? If there are less deaths on the list, what does it mean. Is it a lot? Is it not enough?
aggregation in relation to perception (Hans)
Is it ok if you show how you do it
hiding gruesome footage
(how sad YouTube becomes again the carrier of 'truth')
The Data Guys/Girls vs visual evidence; creating visibility ... so things cannot be ignored (but what does it mean when things are available, but still ignored)
FS: I have tried to make this point in relation to Forensic Architecture before ... But there is something disturbing in the aggregation of fragmented signals/sightings into new "facts", and the way visualisation is confirming a new stability
eric: "the production of a (counter-)visualisation and other counter-objects is also a methodology and question of how something is produced/performed"
hans: counter-visualisation, you create new facts ... a context of power around it.
I am not sure about what this does, obviously -- whether this counts as a counter-bureaucracy, and if yes, if that is undoing anything
"the data part of the story" https://armstradewatch.eu/en/sources
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/pattrn-software-for-citizen-driven-mapping
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-left-to-die-boat
flattened view, view from above
.csv = comma-separated values
'Data export successful'
This morning, converting .csv downloaded from https://missingmigrants.iom.int/downloads to .ods, trying to sense what is going on with this datafication. Can't say much yet about it (trying to write with it) but it is a moving table. It has more than 70.000 rows.
Less on counting, but an interesting OSINT investigation on pushback operations:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/24/eu-border-force-complicit-in-campaign-to-stop-refugees-landing
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/23/frontex-at-fault-european-border-force-complicit-in-illegal-pushbacks
-> initiators of this journalistic research: https://www.lighthousereports.nl/ourprojects/2020/4/5/borders-newsroom (with links to other investigations as well)
Other counting projects on casualties in war:
https://airwars.org/ (ongoing project on casualties due to airstrikes. Originally on Syria and Iraq, now also Libya, Somalia, Yemen)
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ (In reaction to the 2003 US policy of "We don't do body counts")
https://yemendataproject.org/
UN does body count in Afghanistan: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-civilian-casualties-statistics
https://benifiles.com/nl/namenlijst/ - https://www.mo.be/reportage/beni-files-geeft-meer-dan-duizend-congolese-burgerslachtoffers-een-gezicht