Segmented Reporting Timeline

Article-level timeline with bold popups, showing how Nigerian mining reporting shifts from community violence to developmentalism to crisis and environmental memory.

1935–2025 corpus
Article-level dots
Colour-coded reporting genres
Interactive research tool

1. What this visualisation shows

Each dot is a single newspaper article on mining. The horizontal axis shows the year of publication. The light colour bands in the background divide the timeline into three genres of reporting:

1935–1950 — Community-focused reporting: pieces on violence, displacement, strikes, massacres, and everyday resistance in mine communities, especially around Enugu and other coal and metal sites.
1951–1975 — Corporate and government-centred narratives: coverage that foregrounds state corporations, foreign expertise, productivity, and modernisation, often re-framing mining as a development project rather than a site of harm.
2000–2025 — Tragedy-based and environmental reporting: articles keyed to mine collapses, pollution, child labour, insecurity, and state clampdowns, with visible spikes around major crisis events and environmental disasters.

2. How to read the timeline

Hover on a dot to see the headline in bold, followed by the newspaper, date, phase, and year.
Use the legend to toggle phases on and off. For example, isolate only tragedy-based reporting after 2000.
Pan and zoom or use the range slider to focus on specific clusters (e.g. late 1940s, 1960s, or post-2010 spikes).
Use the camera icon to export a PNG for teaching slides, conference talks, or articles.

3. How researchers can use this

From pattern to argument:

Identify spikes in the community-focused phase and cross-check with strikes, massacres, and petitions in your archival files.
Track how often corporate/state narratives dominate after independence, and relate this to state coal policy, nationalisation, and oil-era shifts.
Compare crisis clusters in the 2000–2025 phase (lead poisoning, flooding, mine collapses) to environmental justice campaigns and NGO reports.
Use the dots as an index: note specific dates/newspapers to pull the underlying articles via your MMM data table or NVivo project.

4. Data and citation notes

This visualisation draws on the Media Mining Memory dataset of newspaper reports on mining in Nigeria (1935–2025). Articles are grouped into phases based on year of publication and the project’s interpretive schema of reporting genres.

When citing, you might use a format such as:
“Media Mining Memory – Segmented Reporting Timeline, Nigeria (1935–2025), digital visualisation, Media Mining Memory Project, accessed [date].”

5. Reading the three segments together

The segmentation is not just cosmetic. It offers a way to track shifts in memory and power across the mining archive:

1935–1960 band: look for dense clusters around strikes, killings, and forced labour disputes. This is where newspapers become a record of community testimony and colonial violence, and where your petitions, court records, and oral histories can be placed in dialogue.
1960–1975 band: watch how the dots re-organise around the Nigerian Coal Corporation, state policy, and foreign firms. Even when conflict persists, reporting often adopts the language of development and productivity, showing how postcolonial governance reframes extraction.
2000–2025 band: crisis clusters — such as collapses, poisoning, insecurity, and “illegal mining” — mark the period where abandoned mines and artisanal sites reappear as environmental disasters and security problems. This segment is crucial for connecting environmental memory, eco-technological disability, and contemporary policy debates.

By moving your cursor across the three bands, you can follow how the same landscape is narrated first as a site of labour struggle, then as a development asset, and finally as a zone of toxic crisis and emergency intervention.

Media Mining Memory · Nigeria 1935–2025

An interactive, segmented article-level timeline of Nigerian mining reporting, tracing shifts from community struggle to corporate developmentalism and environmental crisis.

Segmented Reporting Timeline. Each dot is a mining article; shaded bands mark three interpretive phases of Nigerian mining reporting.

MEDIA MINING MEMORY

Mining report timelines chronology · clusters

Interactive timeline