Comments on: Ever have one of those years? And Darfur, mapped. http://www.humanitarian.info/2007/04/16/ever-have-one-of-those-years-and-darfur-mapped/ because information can save lives Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:58:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Tom Longley http://www.humanitarian.info/2007/04/16/ever-have-one-of-those-years-and-darfur-mapped/comment-page-1/#comment-23275 Tom Longley Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:53:02 +0000 http://www.humanitarian.info/2007/04/16/ever-have-one-of-those-years-and-darfur-mapped/#comment-23275 Having worked on large scale war crimes <a href="http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1865&l=1" rel="nofollow">documentation</a> <a>projects</a>, I was quite exited to play with the Crisis in Darfur layers. Like you, I think that it is clearly a leap forward in ICT-enabled advocacy and I hope that it will be picked up by <a href="http://www.avaaz.org/en/" rel="nofollow">savvy organistions</a> which can use it domestically to persuade their supports to exert pressure on elected representatives. Concerning the use of tools like Google Earth by human rights or legal analysts, I'd say that at this point the cost and effort of getting the information into a map format is not still offset by its ultimate analytical value. I am unsure of whether this because GIS is more of an afterthought than a core analytical technique, or because the deep immersion of human rights activists in their data makes maps less useful than other sorts of visualisation. It's interesting that on the same day (...ish) the American Civil Liberties Union released an <a href="http://www.aclu.org/natsec/foia/search.html" rel="nofollow">online database</a> of civil claims made by Iraqi citizens against the US Department of Defence for deaths caused by their actions. It certainly didn't animate the blogosphere in quite the same way. Having worked on large scale war crimes documentation
projects,
I was quite exited to play with the Crisis in Darfur layers. Like you,
I think that it is clearly a leap forward in ICT-enabled advocacy and
I hope that it will be picked up by savvy organistions which can use
it domestically to persuade their supports to exert pressure on
elected representatives.

Concerning the use of tools like Google Earth by human rights or legal
analysts, I’d say that at this point the cost and effort of getting
the information into a map format is not still offset by its ultimate
analytical value. I am unsure of whether this because GIS is more of
an afterthought than a core analytical technique, or because the deep
immersion of human rights activists in their data makes maps less
useful than other sorts of visualisation.

It’s interesting that on the same day (…ish) the American Civil
Liberties Union released an online database
of civil claims made by Iraqi citizens against the US Department of
Defence for deaths caused by their actions. It certainly didn’t
animate the blogosphere in quite the same way.

]]> By: Darfur through Google Earth: The reality of conflict through "Crisis in Darfur" « ICT for Peacebuilding http://www.humanitarian.info/2007/04/16/ever-have-one-of-those-years-and-darfur-mapped/comment-page-1/#comment-23191 Darfur through Google Earth: The reality of conflict through "Crisis in Darfur" « ICT for Peacebuilding Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:50:41 +0000 http://www.humanitarian.info/2007/04/16/ever-have-one-of-those-years-and-darfur-mapped/#comment-23191 [...] Paul Currion has an excellent post on this initiative here. Question remains, how useful will the emergence of new ways to visualise complex datasets through [...] [...] Paul Currion has an excellent post on this initiative here. Question remains, how useful will the emergence of new ways to visualise complex datasets through [...]

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