December 2014
As one of the first projects at SRF Data we published a web documentary, called «Sandalen im Schnee» (sandals in the snow), about the asylum seeking process in Switzerland. The migrant crisis was at its peak and we wanted to explain and document the controversially discussed Swiss asylum seeking process – without resorting too much to the emotional side and without taking party.
We interviewed six asylum seekers from different colors and enriched the explanatory parts (entry, registration, the long wait, decision stay/go, etc.) with their personal stories. The core element and red line of the web documentary is – among video, interactive data visualizations and, of course, text – an interactive navigation that a) always tells the reader where he stands in the text and b) shows a simplified schema of the asylum seeking process in Switzerland.
The web documentary was published as a full page piece with a navigation that shows the asylum seeking process at the same time.
The web documentary was built with Shorthand, which back then had not so much features and was rather tedious to work with (maybe today that’s different). I basically had to reverse engineer and tinker with some of the Javascript in order to plug in the navigation. The navigation was built with native JS and the data visualizations use D3.js and NVD3, a wrapper on top of D3.js.
One of the data visualizations showing origins of asylum seekers over time.
The project was nominated for the German Reporter Prize 2015 and for the Grimme Online Award 2016.