The stories behind a line
Telling stories of migration and refuge with data
Federica Fragapane and Alex Piacentini founded the initiative The Stories Behind a Line. The project tells the stories of six asylum seekers and their journey from their hometown to Italy. Instead of using pictures or writing long texts, the two information designers chose to visualise simple data: kilometres, days, modes of transportation, location. These combined data, visualised in an interactive line, shows the path these six young people took, crossing continents and oceans to arrive in Italy.
The initiative is a valuable example of the communicative potential of data and data visualisation. By publishing their data visualisation, the team concluded to raising awareness and understanding for the situation of migrants and refugees arriving in the EU without bias or blame. Follow their lines on The Stories Behind a Line or read more about Migration data on the European Data Portal.