On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military took over the government through an unlawful coup. Since then, it has violently suppressed civilian opposition using airstrikes, extrajudicial killings, plunder, and sexual violence. Despite the violence committed by the military junta across the country, news about Myanmar remains under-reported in mainstream international media, leading to widespread unawareness about the current humanitarian crises in Myanmar.

In this lightning talk, I want to raise awareness about what is happening in Myanmar by showing you the most common topics reported since the coup. I will present the data analysis and visualization methods I used to identify these topics. I will also discuss the technical challenges I faced in scraping the news data, and methods I have used to work around them. I will end with key insights about patterns of violence in post-coup Myanmar based on my data visualizations.

About the Speaker
Khine Thant Su is a PhD student in Southeast Asian history at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an aspiring data scientist. She loves learning new technologies and tools to benefit social causes, and has spent the past two years learning coding and statistics, and working on independent data projects.