Migration Trail - the opportunities, risks and ethics of mapping migration

This talk will a take a recent data visualisation and mapping project, Migration Trail, as a basis for a discussion of the ethics of cartography. Maps' richness, the detail and amount of information they can bring together, is also what makes them potentially problematic, particularly when a subject such as migration forms the subject of those maps.

Migration Trail launched in November 2017. It is a mapped data visualisation that follows two fictional characters travelling from North Africa and Turkey, to Europe in real time, over ten days. It was designed first and foremost as a storytelling tool, although it has parallels with the maps and technical drawings produced to analyse this issue. As a public document, close attention had to be paid to the different audiences that would be likely to come to it, the different ways in which they would understand it, how people might use or misuse the work. The making of the work also revealed a series of opportunities for storytelling with interactive maps that are now being explored further.