Theme Timeline

A visual guide to how different mining themes appear and intensify across Nigerian newspaper reporting (1935–2025).

1935–2025 Environmental memory Labour & disability Community contestation

1. What you are seeing

Each line in the timeline represents a thematic cluster (for example: Environmental Memory, Labour & Disability, Community Resistance) across the project’s newspaper corpus.

The x-axis is time (year of publication). The y-axis shows the number of articles in which that theme appears in a given year.

2. How to use this as a researcher

Scan for peaks: look for years where a line spikes. These are moments when a theme became particularly visible in public discourse.
Relate peaks to events: connect spikes to key historical events (e.g. Second World War, Nigerian Civil War, oil boom, structural adjustment, mine disasters, major strikes).
Compare themes: turn themes on/off in the legend to see whether, for example, environmental memory becomes more visible after the closure of certain mines.
Trace long arcs: follow a single theme across the entire period to see whether it is intermittent, gradually intensifying, or suddenly eruptive.

3. Step-by-step interaction guide

Hover over a point to see the exact year and article count.
Click a theme in the legend to hide it; click again to show it.
Click-and-drag horizontally to zoom into a specific decade, then use the “Reset axes” button in the Plotly toolbar to zoom out.
Use the camera icon in the Plotly toolbar to download the timeline as a PNG for presentations or publications.

4. Connecting back to sources

Use this timeline together with the Data Table:

Identify a peak year and theme (for example, “Labour & Disability, 1942–1944”).
Open MMM_DATA.html and filter by the same year(s) and theme labels.
Follow links (if available) or metadata to the original articles for close reading, discourse analysis, or NVivo-style coding.

5. Data & methods (short note)

          Behind the figure: Themes are derived from text-analysis
          of Nigerian mining reports (1935–2025), including keyword dictionaries and
          clustering around issues such as environmental harm, mine labour and disability,
          and community protest. Counts are aggregated by year to foreground
          shifts in public discourse rather than individual articles.
        

6. How to cite this visualisation

Suggested citation (example):
“Media Mining Memory: Timeline by Theme,” Reports on Mining in Nigeria (digital project), accessed [date], GitHub Pages / project URL.

Interactive timeline by theme

Use the legend to toggle themes, hover for counts, and zoom into specific decades. This view is designed to help trace the evolution of mining-related concerns over time.