Humanitarian Tracker
Mar 10, 2017
Swedberg, Brian, and Donna Peuquet. "An Evaluation of a Visual Analytics Prototype for Calendar-Related Spatiotemporal Periodicity Detection and Analysis." Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 52.1 (2017): 63-79.
"Visual analytics is frequently used to derive insight into spatiotemporal data sets (MacEachren and others 2011; Malik and others 2012; Razip and others 2014; Sum All and Humanitarian Tracker 2015), but past research has ignored linking localized contextual information"
Apr 2017
Avvenuti, Marco, et al. "On the need of opening up crowdsourced emergency management systems." AI & SOCIETY (2017): 1-6.
"... contributes to its reduction. Collaborative projects like Wikipedia, HarassMap, Humanitarian Tracker, and Ushahidi are just but a few examples of “open” platforms that benefit from an active citizen participation."
Mar 2017
Pavesi, Irene. "Tracking Conflict Related Deaths." (2017).
"... crowdsourcing. Syria Tracker's map of violent events, for example, combines data from media sources with information provided anonymously by civilians who use encrypted technology (Humanitarian Tracker 2016) ..."
Feb 2017
Pavesi, Irene. "Tracking Conflict-related Deaths: A Preliminary Overview of Monitoring Systems." (2017).
... Syria Tracker's map of violent events, for example, combines information provided anonymously by civilians who use encrypted technology and by media sources (Humanitarian Tracker Syria Tracker Syria https://syriatracker.crowdmap.com ..."
2017
Jewell, Nicholas P., Michael Spagat, and Britta Jewell. "Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future."
"Syria Tracker, a project of Humanitarian Tracker (2016) supported by Ushahidi, is probably the most prominent current application of crowdsourcing methods to casualty accounting." "There are two main advantages of the crowdsourcing approach. First, data can be assembled in something close to real time, although this process can be slowed down by the necessity to crosscheck submitted reports. Second, use of the crowd can provide coverage of events that would, otherwise, be lost. Syria Tracker illustrates these advantages with its relatively up-to-date coverage of a country with little on-the-ground media because Syria is currently such a dangerous environment for journalists. As of August 2016, Syria Tracker had documented nearly 150,000 deaths occurring between March 18, 2011 and February 29, 2016."
Nov 24, 2016
Kaarbo, Juliet, and Daniel Kenealy. "Precedents, parliaments, and foreign policy: historical analogy in the House of Commons vote on Syria." West European Politics 40.1 (2017): 62-79.
Nov 3-4, 2016
Human Rights & Technology in the 21st Century, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School "Digital networks are important to human rights monitoring and documentation in two ways: First, human rights groups can “mine” the vast amount of information found on social media platforms as they look for evidence of abuse. Alhinnawi and Kass-Hout described how Syria Tracker captures a steady stream of inputs that are crowd-sourced from people caught in the Syrian crisis, and from over 2,000 news sources and online content (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Syria Tracker displays this information on a digital map with layers of events tagged with meta data and arrayed geospatially and chronologically. Syria Tracker is sometimes referred to as the longest serving crisis map in existence. Quality control is essential. Only 6% of the 150,000 crowd sourced reports to date have been published. This low percentage highlights the strict standards for determining the validity of information received by Syria Tracker. Their reports cover killings, missing people, rape, use of chemical weapons, and refugees. It even helped report 47 massacres not recorded by the media or other humanitarian organizations."
Nov 1, 2016
Widmer, Mireille, and Irene Pavesi. Firearms and Violent Deaths. No. 60. Research Note, 2016.
"The proportion of firearm deaths varies across conflict-affected countries, as well as over time in a single conflict. Such fluctuations reflect changes in the intensity or type of warfare. In Syria, for example, fire-arms accounted for about 80 per cent of fatalities in the early months of the war, between March 2011 and January 2012, when overall fatalities remained well below 2,000 people per month (see Figure 3, Source: Humanitarian Tracker). As the war intensified, in mid-2012, artillery use increased and the proportion of deaths by gunshot dropped below 50 per cent. In the second half of 2012, and particularly from 2015, air bombardments also increased. From January 2015, the annual share of fatal gunshots dropped below 30 per cent of total fatalities, with air bombardments often claiming more lives than either small arms or artillery. Firearms can account for a significant proportion of violent deaths regardless of a country’s overall violent death rate."
Aug 19, 2016
By Hend Alhinnawi, Co-Founder, Humanitarian Tracker.
"Today, on World Humanitarian Day, I want to recognize the thousands of ordinary citizens in Syria have risked their lives to save others and tell the world what is happening on the ground in their country. Equipped with a cell phone, internet access, and a fierce determination to not be silenced, these men and women have achieved something incredible: they have made crowdsourced data an official source. This is the “Mosaic Data” effect, in which every single piece of data received tells us something about the bigger picture. Combining citizen and digital diplomacy for humanitarian tracking and response is not just important; it is necessary and critical to this continuing story of the Syria conflict."