This project for Al Jazeera America used an interactive map to help readers better understand the scale of the Syrian Refugee crisis by using their location to compare the number of refugees to the population in the reader’s geographical area.

It’s challenging for people to properly size the scale of these tragedies, but locating the story in a familiar place is helpful. The tool also allowed users to export images for social sharing, and we created a gallery of user-generated screenshots with comments.

I served as graphics editor for this piece.

Sadly, the project server we published this on is defunct, so the tool no longer works as expected.

The button below links to the version of the project preserved by the Wayback Machine. The map no longer functions as expected as a result of the archival process, but you can get a good idea of how it worked.