Generation E

The voice of Mediterranean migration

Jacopo Ottaviani – @JackOttaviani

Berlin, 27th November 2014

Generation E in numbers

• 3 main threads
• 4 data journalists 
  • Sara Moreira (@saritamoreira, Portugal)
  • Daniele Grasso (@danielegrasso, Spain)
  • Katerina Stavroula (@i_catrin, Greece)
  • Jacopo Ottaviani (@jackottaviani, project manager, Italy)
• 6 languages
• 7+ media outlets
• Several countries involved (both origin/destination)
• 1600+ stories collected

Why E?

• Europe
• Expatriate
• Emigration
• Exodus
• Erasmus

• Exile
• Escape
• Easyjet
• E-mail
• ...

Objectives

Dive into the generation of young south-european migrants

• Connect data to stories (and viceversa)
• Show limits & lacks of existing data
• Approach the topic from a pan-european angle
• Publish stories in multiple languages, raise awareness, fight clichés across EU
• Gather a critical mass of users for future developments of the project

Three main tracks

1. Crowdsourcing stories from young migrants
2. Interviews of policy-makers, researchers and associations
3. Data investigation (for each country)

1st launch 8.9.2014

• Results: 1200 stories in one Excel file
• Multilingual crowdsourcing campaign
• Handmade front-end design (to be embedded in newspapers)
• Data to investigate migration flows
• Source of stories for post series

2nd launch 24.11.2014

• Major findings based on collected data
• interviews to researchers and stakeholders 
• fragments of stories
• form re-launch for future developments
• 8 interviews in German of migrants living in Germany (courtesy of CORRECT!V) - coming soon!

More data

More stories

Major finding #1 - Driving factors

Major finding #2 - Registration

Major finding #3 - Inclination to return

Limits & Potentials

1. The sample is not representative of the population
2. Still useful to tell stories and find interesting insights
3. Methodology behind dataset is not scientific. 
4. However: gold mine of narratives and stories

Future directions

• "Explode" the project in more destination countries 
• Involve new countries (e.g. Romania)
• Publish more stories of migrants ("give numbers a face")
• Explore new narratives and new formats
• Go on-the-ground, meet people and make videos
• Experiment some Natural Language Processing on the stories dataset
• Go offline (events, exhibitions, etc.)

What Portuguese young migrants miss the most?

courtesy of Sara Moreira

Thank you!

Questions? Want to talk?

@jackottaviani