It’s a turbulent time, but video, image, and story sharing on social media gives all of us the chance to stay informed of local happenings around the world. This week, Christine asks about the protest footage coming out of Belarus in the wake of a suspect election. Then JJ describes COVID heat maps and infographics, and explains how they can be used to distort and mislead.
It’s a turbulent time, but video, image, and story sharing on social media gives all of us the chance to stay informed of local happenings around the world. This week, Christine asks about the protest footage coming out of Belarus in the wake of a suspect election. Then JJ describes COVID heat maps and infographics, and explains how they can be used to distort and mislead.
Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ hunt.
Christine:Hi, I'm Christine Malec.
JJ:and I'm JJ hunt. This is talk description to me where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description, rich conversations.
Christine:In previous episodes we've talked about the visuals of protests in the United States, but it's a turbulent time and in many parts of the world, and there has been coverage in the news lately about protests in Belarus. And so we thought we'd talk a bit about the visuals of that and how, how they might differ from what we might be used to, in North America or Western Europe. So, JJ, what are you seeing on the media about the protests going on there?
JJ:There's lots of video, lots of photos, some coming from, the state media in Belarus, but really not as much. A lot of the, a lot of the video that's coming out is kind of underground. So just to a little bit of, a little bit of background information for context here, and I not by any means an expert on the politics of the region, but just a little bit of background. Um, Alexander Lukashenko, uh, has been in power in Belarus since 1994. And there was a recent election. I believe it was August 9th where he won by, with 80% of the vote. Now that was considered suspect by a lot of the, the protesters and many international observers as well. And so the public has come forward and they're demanding that he stepped down now in this part of the world in Belarus, protests are not generally tolerated, but in this case you've got like as many as a hundred thousand people at a time, filing into the independent square in Minsk and, uh, demanding that there be a recount and demanding that, that he stepped down, and, and there's, there's some video that's available that there's some photos of that. And you're right. It is quite different than some of the protests that we're seeing in the United States right now,
Christine:I'm struck by the idea that I grew up feeling that being part of a civil protest was my, my right. And I wouldn't really think twice about it. And as you say, in other parts of the world, that's a much more dangerous undertaking. And so it takes a different kind of courage and motivation to do that. And are there different ways that, that people express themselves in a protest than we are used to?
JJ:Yeah, it is. There are people who are doing all kinds of different things as some that are maybe a little bit surprising because it's not, as you say it is, it is you have to be a little bit brave to be out there when you are, when you're fairly certain that if you are arrested for protesting, which you can be, you are likely to be- certainly the understanding is that you are likely to be beaten and detained for days for protesting. So when you have a hundred thousand people showing up in the main square, and these are people, I was quite surprised in looking at the, looking at the videos. These are people of all ages, men and women. And there are workers who are, who have gone on strike and left their factories, for example. So you've got some protests where there are people, men and women in uniform with hard hats. And there are some protests that are all women and they are wearing the coordinate and they dress in white and they hold white flowers. I saw one video with a group of women lining a street all waving flowers in the air, encouraging motorists to drive by, to honk their horns in support of the protesters and in support of the people who have been arrested. And then when the police move in, it looks decidedly different than when the police moved in, in the recent protests in, you know, say in Portland, for example. So the police in Belarus who are engaging with the public, are, they typically are dressed all in black. Sometimes black like T shirts and shorts, but all black and they were in black balaclavas. So black ski masks. So you can't see their faces at all. They tend to be going into the crowds with batons, um, and they are using them, right? People are, people are being beaten with batons. And sometimes the police will like pick one person out of a crowd or pick one person out of a group of protesters as it marches by. And they'll pull them aside and they'll start beating on the protester. I've seen that in several videos, but the big difference is that then the onlookers, they jump in, they get involved and then they start attacking the police. They start fighting back. So, whereas a lot of the protesters in that we've seen in the United States, when they're getting hit by the police, you curl up and, and, and the onlookers are yelling,"stop it, stop it, stop it. I'm filming you!", all of that. In this situation, in Belarus, certainly the videos I've seen, there's much more of the general public jumping into those nasty situations and fighting back. And I think it's because they know, or they, their understanding is if that person actually gets pulled in and detained their beatings are going to be that much worse. It's gonna get bad.
Christine:Is it also true that the police are less armored because what you're describing is very different from the way the police looked in, in other protests that we've talked about?
JJ:Yeah, absolutely not. So again, the videos I'm seeing, not as much armor, maybe some shields, maybe, you know, some riot shields and, um, and you'll get the batons smacking against the riot shields, which are like sheets of tin in this case. In one case I saw big white sheets of tin, as opposed to the clear plexiglass shields that you've seen in lots of places in the States, not the same kind of sophisticated weaponry. I have seen images of the police in Belarus with guns- handguns, which in a way is almost scarier because these are just, sidearms being drawn on the general public. These aren't those less lethal weapons that we spoke about in an earlier episode. These are just the standard issue sidearms of the police. So when those are drawn, that's really quite scary. I did see some videos that were purportedly from state TV to humiliate some protesters that had been pulled in that had been arrested. And so the videos that were shown were of six young people in a small room with white walls. And and these were protesters who had been detained. Their backs are facing the camera. Their heads are actually they're leaning against the wall and they have their hands held or zip tied behind their backs. And then they're all made to turn and face the camera. And I'm just reading the translation that was given in the tweet in which I saw this. So I'm not sure if this is actually accurate, but what the tweet said was that they were forced to declare that they would no longer protest against the state again. And all of these people, one by one, the camera goes down the line of these protestors and these young people, you know, we're talking, I'm guessing, and they're in their early twenties. They've got red marks on their faces, like fresh bruises, not old, fresh red marks, and one man's bleeding from the forehead. And one by one, they look into the camera and they, and they say something to the effect, apparently that they will not protest against the state, the state again. So these images are being broadcast by state TV, and in response, people are filming in streets and they are submitting their videos to other news organizations and other underground news organizations that can disseminate them on, on YouTube and Twitte and the like.
Christine:Is there an emotional difference that you, as a sighted person looking at it feel when you look at those police who look like that or say the police important who were in camouflage, does it make for a different dynamic when you're just watching it?
JJ:Yeah. I mean, in something like in Portland where you've got the police and the federal agents, and they're in their fatigues, they're in their camouflage, they look like soldiers. And it looks like, you know, we talked about some of this looking like war footage, right? In this case, it doesn't look like war footage. It looks, these are brawls. Like these are groups of citizens, protestors, who are in some cases brawling with these men in black. And because the authorities, the police in these Belarus videos are wearing black and they've got their faces covered in balaclavas. It's an interesting twist on good guy, bad guy, right? Like the balaclavas make them look a little bit like bank robbers, you know, and, and they're outnumbered. I saw one video that was really something, it was on a downtown streets, kind of a split level street. So the road is on our right, and it's about three feet lower than an adjacent business property, which is raised. So there's a big flat ground on our left, dropped down three feet, and then you've got sidewalk and road on our right. And there's a crowd of men standing on the raised area on our left, a big crowd. And they're chanting and screaming at a line of, I think I'm going to guess, like six to eight police officers. They're just all in black and they're on the sidewalk, lower down on our right. And they're lined up beside what I think is an orange detention bus. I saw buses like this and other videos that protestors were being loaded into. So I think it's an orange detention bus. So you get this group of men yelling and screaming at these six to eight police officers, and it's getting really heated, but the police officers are not moving. And then at one point, one of the chanting men takes off his white tee shirts. So now he's bare chested, he's wearing jeans and he jumps down onto the sidewalk to be on the same level as the police. And then another man jumps down and steps beside him. Now, as soon as these two men who are now on the same level as the police step forward, they only take one or two steps forward the police Russian with their batons, and they get their Bhutan's going. And within seconds, the crowd of men pours down onto the sidewalk. They absolutely surround the police. And they're, I mean, they're probably outnumbered, I don't know, 20, 30 to one, it was a full on. And then the video ends. And I have no idea what happens after that. The interesting thing about the videos that are coming forward is that most of them are these cell phone videos. Like the one I just described that are being bounced around. And so it's really hard to put them into context. The state media is not providing the same kind of detailed information that you, that you would hope to get out of some media in the United States or in Canada. The state TV is providing a very one sided view of what's going on. Remember we talked about the naked Athena and the hockey brigade in Portland, right, where there was a, there was a performative element to some of the protests. And there was some of that, like, I hesitate to use playfulness, but there was some, there was something about the way protesters were able to turn their protest into something visually stunning and interesting, which sometimes shed more light on the situation. Sometimes it added to the conversation and I saw a video of this protest art installation from Belarus. It was really striking. So it was a large white inflated ball. I'm guessing like maybe 10 feet in diameter, just a guess. Cause it's a little hard to tell him this cell phone video that was posted and this large white inflated ball has a, a black image of Lukashenko's smiling face on it. And like a real, you know, menacing looking kind of maniacal smiling face, right? And it's bouncing down an empty street, which is lined with mid-rise apartment buildings. And so as it's bouncing down the street, there's an, there's an audio track that's included in this video of a Lukashenko's voice. I don't know what he's saying, but he's like giving a speech and this big white balls bouncing down the street. And then the camera turns and behind it is a slew, a cluster of balls. Some that are just as large and they look like striped snooker ball. So they're white with a thick red Stripe across the middle. And that's the, that's the flag of the Belarus, the white and red Stripe. And so these giant balls are chasing after it. There are some smaller balls that are with the snooker balls that are glowing red, some are glowing, right? And they're bounding after the Lukashenko ball. And as they approach the camera, you can hear there's the sound of a chanting crowd has been added. And I'm not sure what they're chanting. I think it sounded similar to a chant I heard in another protest video, where they were saying,"leave, leave, leave, leave". But I can't be sure about that. So like, this is a piece of protest art that's being added to the conversation. It's really fascinating. It's really to have something like this being made at the same time as citizens are being beaten by police, you know, held in custody for days and days and days, and then paraded in front of cameras with, you know, bruises and bleeding foreheads to have these two things happening at the same time. It's, it's, it's really fascinating. It really is.
Christine:During the COVID pandemic. A lot of the information that is disseminated is visual. And I often think of a quote. I think it's from Benjamin, Disraeli a 19th century, British prime minister. And I think it was him who said"There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics". And this is a quote that's relevant in, in many spheres. I'm sure it's relevant in the visual and the infographic information. So this is an information source that is, um, much less accessible to blind and low vision people. And so it's, it's an aspect of the data that we don't have ready access to, which also means we don't necessarily have ready access to the ways in which this information may be presented or massage or, uh, dealt with. And JJ, when you and I were talking about this, you, you refer to some really interesting examples of how the data has been presented. Can we talk about some of that?
JJ:Oh yeah, yeah. That's so much you're right. So much of the information that's been a spread about COVID and, uh, and it's spread across the world has been in visual form. It does make some sense, right? If you're, if you are dealing with a largely sighted audience and you want to convey a complex spread of a disease across a nation or across the world, having maps and infographics, that's a great way to get a lot of complex information to have it make an impact, right? Because someone who is sighted can glance at it and, and hopefully glean a lot about trends and you can compare and contrast. And there are lots of news organizations that do a decent job of this, right, like USA today. You know, I'm not always a massive fan of USA today, but they've got these funny little snapshots that they do. And they have colorful graphs or charts that are integrated with illustrations or graphic design elements that are based on the theme. So like for example, they have like"who eats the most pasta sauce" was one I saw or"who eats the most pasta" And so they have like a little graphic of a, of a happy chef who's carrying a plate that has bar graphs covered in tomato sauce, right? So like, that's the USA today style version of this, right? And then you've got the Economist magazine and what have, are very small standardized graphs and charts that are kind of in line with a column of text. It's usually a pale blue box, very simple and clean line graphs or bar graphs. They have a very simple black font for the headers and the key, the information below. And then they usually have a fine print at the bottom that details the sources or the additional notes and whatnot. But then with COVID, there've been a lot of maps and the heat map is one of the most often used, have you heard of a heat map before? Is this something...?
Christine:I have not. No, I've never heard of it.
JJ:So heat maps are interesting. They don't actually always have to be a map, but a heat map is basically when you, you show value as color. So for something, if you've got a higher number in a statistic, maybe you're going to get a darker or a brighter color, or your lower numbers are going to have pale colors or you know, it's that kind of thing. So you've got, at a glance, you can see if something's darker or brighter, perhaps that's going to tell you that there's more of something. And if it's paler, there's less. So this is a great way, if you're looking at a map, say of a, of a country or a continent, and you want to express where there are hot spots of something, where there are lots of numbers of something or low numbers of something, you can use one of these maps because you can see at a glance, Oh, this area of the country has a lot of say red, and then all this area has got some pink. So they've got some of whatever's going on and this area is white. So they don't have any of this going on. This is the basic idea of a heat map. The thing is they can really be manipulated and they have been there been some, some pretty atrocious cases of this, during this pandemic. So sometimes in different parts of the United States, there are different state agencies, different health agencies that have put out like dashboards or health websites have been putting out, uh, information about how many cases are in the state. And what they'll do is they'll, um, Georgia did this and Florida did this. They have a map and the map is broken down by district. So it ends up looking like a stained glass window. So you've got a picture of the map of the state, every little district that has an outline. And then the number of cases of COVID-19 that have been reported in each district means it gets a different color. So if there are very few cases, you have a white color in your little district, if you have a handful of cases, maybe you get a pale blue. If you've got a moderate number of cases, then it's a darker blue. If you've got a lot of cases, it's either dark blue or red. And that's how you can look at a glance and you can see this kind of stained glass window of a map where all the different areas have been colored in all the different districts have been colored in. It's a great way to get this information across and they have a standard map. So week by week, you can glance at the map and you can see the changes. Now here's the problem. There's a key underneath the map. And that tells you how many cases are represented by each color. So I'm looking at two maps right here. These are cases per 100,000 people. The first map is from July 2nd, 2020. The second map is from July 22nd, 2020. So 20 days apart and glancing at these two maps, I've got them side by side when I'm able to see by looking at them as the colors are more or less the same. So the map from July 2nd has mostly pale blues near the South. This is in Georgia, near the South of the state. There's some, there's some concentrated areas where there's some darker blue, and then there are three little districts that are red. So I can tell by that map that there are, you know, some parts of the state where there aren't a lot of cases. There are some where there are a moderate amount, and there are a couple of districts that have spiked. Now you look at the map from the 22nd, and there's a little bit more of that darker blue, just a little bit more, some extra cases of pale blue and not as many that are just white. And instead of there being three red districts, there are now four. So I'm looking at that. And I'm seeing well that w you know, the, the map from the 22nd, it looks like there's a few more cases. It's, you know, clearly it's growing a little bit, but it's not growing by a ton. That's what visually at a glance, that's what these maps are telling me, but then you look to those keys. And what I learned by looking at the key is the palest blue color on the map from the second represents one to 620 cases per 100,000. But on the map on the 22nd, that exact same color now represents between one and 907 cases. So you can have a third more cases, and you're going to be assigned the same color. And by the time you get to the higher numbers, so the darkest blue that's available on the second that dark blue was for 1,623 cases to 2,960, 20 days later, they use the exact same color to represent 2,118 cases to 3,390 cases.
Christine:Oh my God.
:So you have at a glance, an image that tells you that,"Oh, there's been a few more cases. It's going up a little bit, not too bad", but when you look at the key, you can see this is spiking, absolute, pure manipulation based on the fact that sighted people are glancing at these maps and getting their information quickly and making their judgements quickly, instead of looking at the data and reading the data.
Christine:So I'm going to assume there's no big fat banner across the top saying we changed the key value.
JJ:Exactly. It's all very, very subtle, very subtle. They don't, really, you know, the state of Georgia doesn't want you to see that it's there, but you're not, you're not reading it, especially with a map that is being presented to you daily or weekly. This is the same map that's being presented to you over time.
Christine:It's a rare and interesting example of how, the way you consume the data is really relevant. So as a blind person, I'm thinking, okay, that's really overt. And that wouldn't have worked on me. If I was following the data in Georgia, I would not be following in that way. I would be looking at a table or something, which is just numbers. And so it's one of the rare cases where I actually have the advantage in, in the data, if I'm, you know, not scrupulous and examining every tool of how it's being done every time I check it out, uh, that's a case where I would actually not be misled.
JJ:I think you're right. I think you're right.
Christine:Are there other types of infographics that are used? I'm just interested in the different ways that information is disseminated, because I know by talking with sighted friends that everyone's looking at this stuff, and of course you would, and I totally get that looking at it at a glance. That's a very efficient way. That's why they're invented, right. That's why visual means of presentation is because they're so, they're so quick. Can we talk a bit about just the range of tools that are used to convey the information visually
JJ:There were a couple others. So another map based one that again, has been used a lot in the COVID era is the map of a country with circles that are indicating hotspots of COVID, but the size of the circle represents more cases. So instead of the color being lighter or darker, it's about the size of a circle. So if you have a tiny circle over a city or state that tells you that there are relatively few cases, if you have a larger circle that tells you that that case is a hotspot, but the problem here is that that larger circle is taking up more real estate. And so visually it actually makes it look like it's a wider spread area, a wider spread hotspot, as opposed to just a spiking number. Right? So that's a misleading one that, uh, some news agencies have been called on that. I think CNN was doing a lot of that hotspot, and they have, they have slowed down on that. They're now doing the heat map thing. Then there's bar graphs, bar graphs are really interesting because it seems at first glance, like a bar graph is going to be a good way to give standard information, and it's not going to be easily manipulated. So the bar graph, you've got a vertical axis and a horizontal axis, and you've got bars that typically go up. So they go up along various points on the horizontal axis, and there are numbers along the vertical axis and the higher, the number, the taller, the bar, the lower, the number, the shorter the bar. So what you end up with are these comparative like skyscrapers. So you can see which one's taller, which one's shorter, great and simple, but those can be manipulated too. And I hadn't really thought about this until I was looking it up and looking for different examples, but say, you've got a situation where you are comparing three different numbers. You're comparing 62, 54 and 52. If you have a bar graph that starts at zero, the vertical axis starts at zero and goes up to say, 80, the number 62 goes highest, the number 54, almost as high, but it's lower. And the number 52 is going to be lower than that, right? So you have these three towers, these three bars, and, you know, one's a little higher, one's a little lower, but they're in the same ballpark. Now, the way you can do that in a misleading way is let's say, you're going to say, you know what, that's there there's too much bar here. So we're just going to start the vertical axis, we're going to start at the number 50, because the rest is all the same anyway. Right? They're all, they're all above 50. So now you've set it up. So when they start at 50 and you've set it up so that the Y axis goes up to 80, the one that's 62 is going to appear quite a bit higher because it's going to keep going well past 50, the one that's 54 is only going up a little bit. The one that's 52 is barely on there at all. So it looks like those are much further apart. Wow. There's a big difference between, you know, group A and group C that fit the number 62 and 52 aren't as far off as that disparity, that difference between the tall tower and the tiny little one that barely registers on that graph is showing you. So you can, if you want to, or even if you don't want to, even if it's just an accident, you can, you can really be misleading when you're using even a bar graph or something like that.
Christine:I'm thinking about the Georgia example you gave earlier. And this of course is all about how information is disseminated. How did you find out about that?
JJ:I saw it on Twitter. I saw someone that was, was posting about this, like,"Read the key, read the key!" And, posting out images, screenshots of these two things. And then I went to the website and sure enough they're there. And there was an explanation on the website."Oh, no, we were not using these maps to compare. We didn't, we didn't expect them to be used to compare over time. We wanted them as..." Okay, whatever...
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