Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

The rising field of Crisis Mapping is a humanitarian tool that utilizes a variety of techniques to strategically map events so that interested parties, locally or globally, can follow crises and respond to them, ideally in their emerging phases. These crises can include anything from natural disasters to mass atrocities in a given area.  

One of the main components included in this idea of Crisis Mapping is the utilization of technology. “The idea behind Crisis Mapping is to allow individuals witnessing an event to post information to dynamic maps (often through Google Maps) by up-loading images or text reports from a mobile device. These images or text files are linked to a particular geographic location on an interactive map where users can click on marked locations and view the posted information.  As individuals submit information to a map, crisis patterns emerge, allowing for better intervention strategies.” [quote from The Documentalist] This type of mapping also aides in recording specific data for following the emergence of human rights events around the globe.

Key components of Crisis Mapping include the following:

• Mobile Crisis Mapping: The use of mobile technologies and methodologies to collect and validate event-data for Crisis Mapping.
• Automated Crisis Mapping: The use of natural language processing and computation linguistics to detect and collect event-data for crisis mapping.
• Crisis Mapping Analytics: The use of visual analytics and advanced spatial econometrics to identify and understand dynamic patterns in crisis mapping data.
• Crisis Mapping Response: The use of crisis mapping for decision support, programmatic response and monitoring and evaluation.

The first conference on the topic, the International Conference on Crisis Mapping was co-founded and co-organized by Patrick Meier, a PhD candidate at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and Jen Ziemke, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at John Carroll University (JCU). It took place in Cleveland, Ohio on October 16th-18th, 2009 with over 60 organizations represented. Click here to find links to a large portion of the content from the conference.

Crisis Mapping provides the opportunity to visualize the ambiguity that surrounds humanitarian crises and conflict. It provides a structure within which international humanitarian organizations and aid agencies have the potential to prevent massive human rights atrocities, more efficiently coordinate their resources, evaluate the current status of their humanitarian practices and much more.

If you are interested in this topic and would like to participate in further discussion, join us next week when New Tactics will be featuring “Geo-mapping for Human Rights” as the topic for our October online dialogue. New Tactics and featured practitioners will be available to discuss and answer questions from October 28th through November 3rd, 2009. 

For more information:
http://www.crisismapping.net
http://hhi.harvard.edu/programs-and-research/crisis-mapping-and-early-warning
http://irevolution.wordpress.com/