On January 28, 2020, US President Donald Trump formally announced his long-awaited Middle East Peace Plan to resolve the seven-decade-long Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
He hailed it as "the deal of the century".
But is this new plan any different from the many previous deals and declarations that have tried to determine the fate of the Palestinian people?
To find out, we read and then visualised all 181 pages of Trump's “Vision for Peace” and compared it to the most notable documents on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
Despite having the potential to impact the lives of millions of people, very few readers would spend the time reading, and more importantly, trying to comprehend the language of a 181 page document.
That's where the power of data visualisation really stands out. By carefully encoding text as data we were able to communicate hundreds of pages into an easy to use and exploratory data visualisation.
Each major topic was summarized and colour coded to cut through political jargon without losing a single bit of context. To better understand how language has shaped the political discourse, we also read through seven of the most notable documents that have featured in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Within each document, we used text summarisation techniques to count the number of times key topics were mentioned and, perhaps more interestingly, - not mentioned. The result is a series of graphics and short video that reveal how the use of key topics has changed over the past century.
This was by far the most shared, viewed and engaged story across Al Jazeera's digital platforms on the proposed Middle East peace plan.
The otherwise complicated political document was viewed over 100,000 times with the average reader spending 4:36 on the page. Several academic analyses and think tanks have also cited the study, demonstrating that data visualisation can be both
This was by far the most shared, viewed and engaged story across Al Jazeera's digital platforms on the proposed Middle East peace plan.
The otherwise complicated political document was viewed over 100,000 times with the average reader spending 4:36 on the page. Several academic journals and think tanks cited the project as a reliable and impartial source of information on a normally contested topic.
This demonstrates that data visualisations can combine powerful visual narratives with depth and accuracy.
