One Row Cannot Hold Life
An interactive data visualization exploring migrant deaths and how they are recorded, mapped, and remembered through data.
June 2025 · Self-initiated project
Methods/Tools: Data Visualization, CSV Data Analysis, Interface Design, Web Design This project uses data from the Missing Migrants Project, which records people who die during migration towards an international destination, and translates these deaths into a growing field of black points. Each incident enters the interface one by one; each recorded death becomes a point. At first, the field remains readable. Over time, it becomes increasingly dense and difficult to separate, until individual records begin to disappear into a larger mass.
The project asks what happens when human loss is made visible through data, and where such representation begins to fail. It tries to hold a tension: making the scale of death visible without allowing each life to dissolve into a number, a point, or an unreadable field. But as the field grows denser, this becomes impossible.
Every quarter second, a new incident is added to the field. You can pause, accelerate, reset, or skip through it. By hovering or clicking on the points, you can view the known data behind each incident, including date, location, route, cause of death, origin, and source quality. A second coordinate field shows incidents with recorded locations, deliberately without using a conventional map.
Methodology
The interface uses CSV data from theIOM Missing Migrants Project, recording known migrant death incidents from 2024. Each row in the CSV represents one incident. The interface reads the recorded number of deaths, the date, location, cause of death, migration route, origin, source quality, and coordinates when available.
Every quarter second, one incident is added to the field. Each recorded death becomes one black point. If 70 people died in one incident, 70 points appear at the same time. The point is intentionally a very reduced form of representation: it makes the death countable and visible, but it also shows how easily a human life becomes a unit of data. At the same time, without this data, many of these deaths would remain even less visible, or might not be noticed at all. The project stays inside this contradiction instead of trying to resolve it.
At the beginning, the field is still readable. Individual points can be seen, hovered over, and clicked. The user can access the known information behind each incident. But as more incidents enter the interface, the points begin to overlap. The field becomes denser, less precise, and eventually almost unreadable. This loss of readability is part of the project. The interface does not only display the data; it also shows the limits of displaying death through data.
The user can pause the interface, accelerate it, reset it, or skip forward by 80 incidents. These controls are functional, but they also create a certain discomfort. Moving faster through the interface also means moving faster through recorded deaths.
The increasing density of the field was important to me. At first, the field seems ordered and accessible. But with every new incident, the field becomes harder to read. Individual deaths disappear into a larger surface. In the end, the field almost turns into a black field. This is the point of the project: the records become overwhelming, and the attempt to make every death visible begins to collapse.
Below the main field, incidents with available coordinates are shown as points on a white coordinate field. I deliberately did not use a geographical map. especially the Mediterranean Sea and coasts, the west coast of Africa, and parts of the Americas; Afghanistan is also easy to identify. The absence of the map makes the concentration of incidents more visible: the geography appears through the deaths themselves. We already know where most incidents happen.
The visualization also does not end neatly. It stops at the latest available update, in the middle of the field. The field is not complete. This was important because the project is not showing a closed historical event. It shows something ongoing. The data stops because the records stops at a certain date, not because the deaths have stopped. The project was updated on the 6th of May 2026.