#MigrantsFiles: the European investigation on 23,000 migrants died from 2000 to 2013 trying to reach Europe.

1. #MIGRANTSFILES
http://dtnj.it/tmf-en
CC-BY 4.0 International

2. DATANINJA.IT / ABOUT US
Dataninja is a data journalism network founded in 2012
Our aim is to tell stories from data analysis, the so-called
We deal with journalism and teaching together with the main
Italian editorial groups and the more advanced public
administrations on Open Data topics.

3. THE CONTEXT: INFORMATIONS ON THE WEB
From the dawn of civilization until 2003,
humankind generated five exabytes of data.
Now we produce five exabytes every two
days… and the pace is accelerating!
Eric Schmidt , Google’s executive chairman | http://goo.gl/pgle3G

4. WHY DATA VISUALIZATION?
As it had never happened in our lives, today we have access to tons of free information
and for free. With the right tools we can begin to make sense of these data to see
patterns and trends that otherwise would be invisible to us. Transforming numbers in
graphic form allows readers to learn about the stories that those numbers hiding.
Alberto Cairo, "The functional Art" | Source: http://goo.gl/KHm3hT

5. THE INVESTIGATION OF L'ESPRESSO
simultaneously on 9 newspapers in six European
countries in March 31, 2014

6. THE NEWS
FROM 2000 TO 2013 MORE THAN 23 THOUSANDS OF MIGRANTS
HAVE DIED TRYING TO REACH EUROPE

7. ROUTES
EIGHT ROUTES OF ENTRY

8. ROUTES MORTALITY
It was possible to estimate a mortality rate of each route:
calculation shows that the most critical one starts from the
Maghreb towards Sicily

9. 1. DATA

10. INVESTIGATION BASIS
official monitoring for victims (neither by Italy, nor by
European Union)
Two EU agencies monitor frontiers (Frontex, Eurosur)
datasets based on articles and posts from media,
observatories and blogs built by NGOs (Fortress Europe,
United for Intercultural Action, PULS dell'università di Helsinki)
studies and analysis regarding specific territories
(Sicilia, Canarie) or time intervals (a single year, a season)

11. FORTRESS EUROPE
scraped data from the Fortress Europe website.

12. UNITED FOR INTERCULTURAL ACTION / PULS
scraped and collected data from United for
Intercultural Action e PULS websites

13. SCRAPING / MERGING / DEDUPLICATION
These are all activities necessary to extract data from their
original rigid containers (web pages and PDFs), to structure
them as tables and so to make them machine readable
Original different structures are adapted to have a single useful
one (date / location / description / source / ... )
We have finally aggregated all data in a single table and cleaned
it deleting double events thanks to a semi automatic
deduplication process

14. NEW DATABASE
It contains 2700+ events (during which 23000+ migrants died
from 2000 to 2013) and it is browsable
http://themigrantsfiles.com

15. ENTITY EXTRACTION
Single events (ie. shipwrecks) are put in relations by extracting
entities (ie. events' typologies, locations, victims' types)
Link: http://goo.gl/xy0h0Q

16. 2. TEAM

17. TEAM PLAY
The investigation was performed by 10 people among journalists,
data scientists, developers and more, thanks to an on-line shared
platform.

18. ROLES AND METHODOLOGY
A coordinated the whole process and checked
progress
searched for data and contextual informations and
fact checked them, also with a sample testing strategy (fact-checking
)
tried to provide an error estimation of the data
manipulation process (about )

19. METHODOLOGY ON L'ESPRESSO
Below the article published on L'Espresso there is also a
methodological note with contacts | Link: http://goo.gl/9gpvlA

20. FACT-CHECKING AT THE UNIVERSITY
Some students in digital journalism at the University of Bologna
helped us to check single events (thanks to prof. Carlo Gubitosa)

21. 3. RESULTS

22. MARCH 31, 2014: THE PUBLICATION DAY
The investigation was published simultaneously on 9 newspapers
from 6 different European countries, creating a widespread
distribution in each country

23. IMPACT
During 24h, 2000+ tweets in 11 different languages are sent
Mainly English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Greek
| http://goo.gl/cTZyqq

24. AWARDS: BRUSSELS AND BARCELONA
The investigation was presented at the DataHarvest+ Conference
in Brussels and won the Data Journalism Awards in Barcelona
(June 2014)

25. VIDEO
#migrantsfiles: http://vimeo.com/97210043