Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data Visualization

Alberto Meouchi, Enrique Casillas, Sarah E. Williams

2025

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in developing data visualizations used for humanitarian advocacy and policy change, is creating empathy for the experiences of people described in the data. Summarizing their hardship as numbers and charts does not do justice in describing the often-traumatic experiences they face. In many cases the results of these data visualizations often further remove the subjects from their story making it more difficult for viewers of the data visualization to empathize with their cause. Our research sought to change this dynamic through the creation of Vida Migrante, an online interactive game and data visualization illustrating the trade-offs migrants make every day. Rather than creating graphs or charts from the survey data collected by our partners at the World Food Programme, our interactive visualization uses that data to drive the interactive game experience for our audience to help them learn about the migrant experience. In this paper we illustrate how this interactive game/visualization helped to create empathy in its viewers. Drawing from literature on measuring empathic behavior, our research team developed a delivered a user surveys that allowed us to measure the level of empathy the game created in users. The results showed that while most users already had some level of empathy towards migrants, all participants of the study increased their level of empathy as they were able to step into the migrants’ shoes and learn new facts and conditions of the migrant experience that they were previously unaware.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Meouchi A., Casillas E. and Williams S. (2025). Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data Visualization. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: HUCAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 653-665. DOI: 10.5220/0013347500003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{hucapp25,
author={Alberto Meouchi and Enrique Casillas and Sarah Williams},
title={Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data Visualization},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: HUCAPP},
year={2025},
pages={653-665},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013347500003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: HUCAPP
TI - Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data Visualization
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Meouchi A.
AU - Casillas E.
AU - Williams S.
PY - 2025
SP - 653
EP - 665
DO - 10.5220/0013347500003912
PB - SciTePress