These visualizations geographically contextualize the UN’s disability photographs, describing the frequency of photographs by country and region.

My initial attempt at mapping the data indicated a need to manually define coordinates for locations that Tableau does not recognize. For example, the entry “Tongnae, Republic of Korea” refers to a district in the city of Busan, and uses the old transliteration for what is now written as Dongnae-gu. Photographs listed in former states, namely European colonies and countries in the Eastern Bloc, were adjusted to present-day locations for them to appear on the map in Tableau. Furthermore, a large number of photographs were taken in official UN functions at the UN Headquarters in New York. These seemed to distort the geographic distribution and focus of UN disability photography “from the field,” so visualizations for Photographs per Country over Time are presented with and without photographs from the UN Headquarters. 

Location of the photographs, most importantly, demonstrates the type of people the UN saw as the “faces” of the “problem” of disability. Where are the majority of photographs being taken? What types of people – ethnicities and otherwise – are being depicted? The visualization of the dataset suggests that most of the photographs were from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.¹

Ultimately, as this project continues to look at photographs from different organizations with different geographic definitions, I will superimpose the dataset onto the regional divisions defined by WHO. Furthermore, basic number of photographs for each of these regions should be presented in the visualization. The UN's geographic region definitions, along with a list of countries in each region, can be downloaded from the UN website. This is the UN’s List of Countries Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49)

1. Even with pictures taken in the US, subjects skew heavily to minorities.