It’s strange that I couldn’t find any Wikipedia either for Transfeminicide or Transphobic Femicide. I also couldn’t find the definition of this term on Merriam-Webster. I guess this word based on the term “Femicide” which according to Merriam-Webster refers to the gender-based murder of a woman or girl by a man and first known used in 1976. So, transfeminicide could also means anti-trans violence, especially against transgender women. 

I first encountered to this topic few years ago when I started to take a Voguing class in Berlin. My dance teacher recommended us to watch the movie Paris is Burning, a tragic documentary film about the ball culture in New York city mostly for Afro-American, Latino gay, transgender community. I guess, we knew that transgender as a minority mostly experience discrimination in the society, probably it’s also because how they’ve been represented in the media. Another documenter film on Netflix, Disclosure, follows in-depth look at Hollywood’s depiction transgender people and the impact of their stories on transgender lives and American culture.

For our Unit 2 class with Llwelyn, we could chose a topic to build our own project in p5.js. I knew that I wanted to do a project about gender issue so I started to search for the data set and found an interesting data on Kaggle with the hashtag Queer Women Violence and more specifically transfeminicides. From this dataset, I started to set up the plan of how I wanted to show the data using P5.

I was aware that javascript is not my expertise yet and I still find difficulties to code, so I didn’t want to set a high expectation but just wanted to learn of how I could manage a project from scratch. Since there’s an information about Latitude and Longitude in the dataset, I knew that I am gonna create a project based on maps.

One of my inspiration is Queering The Map website. Because there’s an information about cause of death, so I aimed to include this information and put it in the category. This approach reminds me of my previous project for the Unit 01 to show Black Lives Matter victims.

I found so many obstacles during the project especially to understand using the function. Realising my limitation, I contacted the digital space at LCC to ask a help from Edmund. He helped me to solve some problems that I encountered. After I compared how different the approach that Llwelyn and Edmund took, I came to realised that we can code with different ways and end up with the same result. However one way could be more efficient than the others.

There are so many categories in the dataset with up to 3 death causes for each victims, so I categorised it by shape and colours. To be honest, I didn’t focus on this because my aim is to focus more on the coding side rather than spending too much time thinking about the dataset.

We spent few weeks to finish this project, however I didn’t feel that I dedicate my time too much in this project because it was also during the weeks of our first assessment for Unit 01. I realise that my code is not efficient enough because I wrote all the shapes and colours one by one. I’ve asked Llwelyn and Edmund about this but it seemed that we should spend more time to crack this issue. Regarding the dataset, I also questioned if all data represents transfeminicides because I found some causes related to Covid-19. I am sure this data also doesn’t represent all victims around the world because it shows more victims in the US and very little in Africa, for example.

I also think that my code still has some missing points and still far from perfect. I was thinking to generate it with creative coding for the finishing but this would take more time. So at the moment, I feel all right to just be able to do a coding project from scratch which I couldn’t imagine when I first started learning P5.