The Price of Speaking Up
About the CSO
Violations Documentation Center Syria (VDC) collects data on the imprisonment, torture, missing and deaths of civilians, rebels, and regime forces in Syria. VDC was established in June 2011 and is one of the largest human rights organisations with staff members and contacts inside Syria, with a presence in all governorates and most cities. In December 2013 Razan Zaitouneh, the founder of VDC and her colleagues Wael Hamada, Samira al-Khalil, and Nazem Hamadi were abducted by group of armed men who stormed the VDC the office in Douma. There has been no news of their whereabouts since. VDC staff continue to work under the guidance of a board of directors and is frequently called upon to provide in-depth briefings to world forums such as the United Nations Security Council.
The Team
Clockwise from top left: Yana (data journalist, USA), Stina (journalist, Sweden), Dia (VDC representative), Yusuf (Designer, Egypt), Marwa (Designer, Lebanon/Italy), Salma (data researcher, Egypt), Irina (developer, Ukraine/Canada)
About the topic
The war in Syria started in the spring of 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used deadly force against protesters demanding his resignation. When VDC attended the Data4Change sprint in 2015 the war had been going on for four years and people outside Syria were becoming increasingly jaded with the conflict.
A look at the data
In 2015 VDC’s database contained more than 150,000 entries. The data VDC wanted to focus on was the “martyrs” which contains data on more than 128,000 civilians (adults and children) and rebels who had died in the war. This data included their full names, gender, age, location, date of death, method of death, and could also include multimedia such as photos, videos, articles and more. Read more about VDC’s data collection and research methodology here.
Their objectives
The VDC team had up to this point not done any data visualisation or data storytelling. They came to Data4Change in the hope to learn how to humanise their huge dataset so that the victims of the war would no longer just be seen as numbers but as people. They wanted to create an emotive digital data visualisation of their dataset, and create a visual framework for their monthly reports.
Results The VDC team wanted to humanise their huge dataset of Syrian victims through the introduction of one young boy’s story. They chose the story of 13-year-old Hamza Al-Khateeb, who was detained, tortured and killed by the authorities in 2011 after attending a demonstration with his parents and whose death sparked protests across the country.
To explain to their audience that Hamza was not that different from other Syrian victims who opposed the regime or ISIS they framed their story in the context of the “price of standing up for your rights”, asking the audience a question to lure them into the story which animates and prompts the user to click on “find out why”.
Once the user decides to find out more they are given an introduction screen about Hamza’s story. Which leads to an animated video of the data visualisation which starts zoomed in on the database entry of Hamza’s death and then zooms out to reveal that his entry is just one of more than 120,000 people.
Once fully developed, the concept would allow a person to access each person’s story through the interactive data visualisation and explore VDCs database using various filters.
ImpactAfter the sprint VDC embraced the power of design and data visualisation and in 2016 they underwent a complete redesign of their website and transformed they way they communicate and present their powerful data.
VDC’s designers were given bespoke training by Small Media and Data4Change staff who helped them set up templates and refine the website design and communication strategy.
As a result VDC started producing monthly statistical reports on the casualties in Syria and also started to create infographics, data visualisations and data driven animations for social media (facebook examples).
Data4Change and its partner organisation Small Media also created an animated explainer video for VDC about their work in English which has been shared widely on social media.
