Today I had the pleasure of seeing the presentations of projects completed by  groups in my english class. The projects presented today focused on presenting archival information in a way that can help further research and understanding of the personal documents of prominent people within British Columbia. I, however, saw potential for a couple of the formats used by the groups to showcase their work to be effective in presenting other information. One project in particular that I thought did a great job of presenting the information they had, and thus got me to think that this format could also be used to display other information, was a groups project that did a “Info Graph”.  The way they presented the information was clear and appealing to eye and provided easily understood chunks of information that (literally) mapped out the thinking process for the reader. The group was composed of Anna, Emily, Emma, and Mishal and they provided information on the racism against Chinese citizens in Canada.

During their presentation, I could not help but think of an article we had to read earlier in the class by Jiwani & Young called “ Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” The paper focused on the missing and murdered women on the downtown East Side of Vancouver.  The paper  mainly focused on the media representation of the women and how the discourse surrounding the news story tended to paint the woman as the problem and continually marginalized them (Jiwani and Young, pg 895).  Throughout the entire article they continued to point out various news stories and different accounts in which the woman who got attacked were poorly represented. I believe that this article would benefit from organizing the information into a info graph in order to give a time line to the readers for better understanding. Obviously, an article form is better for scholarly readers, however, in order to get awareness out to non scholarly audiences, it might be beneficial to breakdown the information and present it in a way that the reader can clearly see the tactics used by the media. One way the media tried to dehumanize the victims were by grouping them as “aboriginal” and “sex workers” (Jiwani and Young, pg 895).  It is important to not let that veiled discrimination slide, the more people that are looking for the ways in which the news skews its stories, the better.

The analysis done in the research paper could bring awareness to a larger audience and help to change the conversation surrounding woman’s portrayal in the media, particularly surrounding aboriginal woman . The potential for the amount of people that could have access to that information and actually become aware of this issue if an info graph was given to an audience, for example, like high school students, is amazing. It would be so useful to have a time line of the attacks juxtaposed with the news coverage of that attack. I think that information would provide a harrowing portrayal of the medias short fallings in covering these cases and allow people to realize the stigmas they might hold themselves.

Citation:

Jiwani, Yasmin and Young, Mary Lynn. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Web. 3. Feb. 2016