NEWS MAPPING

‘Thairath’ is the best-selling newspaper of Thailand. Its popularity has been claimed for the past decades. Yet I personally do not consider it as my top choice of newspaper. At 14, I managed to tell the newspaper guy to switch our subscription to others. This was to me, a victory of a child who had to take in extensively violent and sensational information every morning (even with just glances on the headlines). However, the news Thairath choose to focus on is also the reflection of what Thai people are interested in and vice versa. I decided to investigate into the contents, direction, and patterns of Thairath news coverage, particularly in the year 2010.



THE PROCESS

Within one A4 page, I arranged a thumbnail size of daily newspaper coverage, respectively. It become a calendar of major events.

The duration was extremely longer than I had expected. Since it involved the analysing of each headlines in order to accurately put it in category. An overall duration process for categorising news from the first half of the year took around 27 hours to process.

During the map making, I experienced variety of psychological and physical struggles. There are articles that affected me emotionally; mostly I encountered depression and frustration from the news involving rapes, suicides, murders within the family and also bombs during the protests.

Due to the long physical involvement of process, I also suffer from chemical of the highlight pens that I have to wear protection mask on the last few days. Moreover, I suspect that an over-consumption of news content had generated very distorted, vivid dreams during the week, such as the dream that my boyfriend was abused from my best friend’s parents or being in the middle of murder scenes.



THE OUTCOME






The 42 x 120 cm poster revealing an overall picture of news that occurred in Thailand during January 2010 - June 2010


The recurrence of the colour blue (Internal Politics) is very intense during the time period. At the same time there is a tendency to see reoccurring news regarding terrorists and bombs.

Blue = National Politic
Green = Social News
Yellow = Royal Family
Orange = Terrorist/Bombs
Vermillion = Violent Crime
Pink = Entertainment
Purple = International Affair

TYPE
Information Graphics

YEAR
2010 

PLACE
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London