At the University of Michigan, Mapping Software Reveals Prevalence of Anti-AAPI Hate

Throughout 2020, Dr. Melissa Borja, an assistant professor in the department of American culture at the University of Michigan (U-M), and a small team of researchers scoured media sites looking for news coverage of incidents of anti-Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate.

Dr. Melissa BorjaBorja and her team identified 1,023 incidents in 4,337 news articles; 679 were incidents of harassment or vandalism, and 344 were incidents of stigmatizing or discriminatory statements, images, policies, or proposals. Women were victims in nearly two thirds of all reported incidents, and people of Chinese descent were more likely to experience hate.

"I wanted people to know that this wasn’t just a California or New York problem," said Borja. "It was important to me to have a more complex view of this being a problem in our own communities.”

Borja wanted to make her team's research more accessible and easy to understand. People may not read a 20-page report, she said, but they will definitely interact with a website. So, she reached out to Peter Knoop and his research computing and infrastructure team at U-M. Knoop is an advocacy and research support lead. He helps the College of Literature, Science and the Arts translate their research using clever and communicative software like geographical information system (GIS). Using GIS, Knoop turned Borja's data into the Virulent Hate website, creating interactive maps that clearly and quickly illustrate just how prevalent instances of anti-AAPI hate were around the country.

“To be able to share research with the world, the mapping and the public facing scholarship component of this is critical for us to change the conversation and help us understand things better,” said Borja.

Borja said she assumed the pandemic would end in 2020, and that incidents of hate connected with the virus would subside. Instead, said Borja, incidents have increased substantially in the first few months of 2021, especially as tensions between the U.S. and China continues to build. So, the project has now expanded, and Knoop, Borja, and her team will continue to track the spread of anti-AAPI hate around the country through the end of 2021.

Borja's research team, mostly young, AAPI-identifying students, read each and every single anti-AAPI hate incident reported that they could find, manually categorizing and coding each. The work, said Borja, was morally exhausting.