Digital Humanitarians Research Articles

Digital Humanitarians and International Lawyers: Worlds apart or Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The field of humanitarian assistance is undergoing a computational revolution, but international lawyers are slow to realize it. Thanks to the deployment of data analytics, humanitarian agencies are increasingly able to forecast where and when a crisis will strike, whom it will affect, and what needs it will create. These developments enable new and promising models of anticipatory response, but also raise concerns in terms of risk management and irresponsible experimentation. Yet, so far, international lawyers have been strikingly silent about the normative implications of digital humanitarianism. Seeking to fill the gap, this article assesses the impact of data- driven humanitarian response on the practice of international law, and sets out some broad parameters for dialogue and mutual engagement between the two fields of expertise. That engagement requires, first, an understanding of the normative character of humanitarian data practices. Based on that understanding, international lawyers can contribute to the regulation of digital humanitarian networks and help steer the system towards greater accountability.

Rise of Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) in Southeast Asia: Social Media Insights for Crisis Mapping in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)

Digital technologies and big data speedily change humanitarian crisis response and transform the processes from traditional to digital. Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) for disaster risk reduction (DRR) using crisis mapping of the vulnerable population is becoming increasingly common during any disaster response process. To get the information and provide in time support, the critical Source of data is social media. In Southeast Asia, Facebook is the most used social media platform. Communities often rely on social media to seek in time assistance and guidance. Emerging social media and networks are remarkably well-compatible with intelligent data-centric systems, which foster an effective disaster management plan under disaster scenarios. During previous disasters in Southeast Asia, it was believed to be the fastest response medium. However, validation is essential to obtain important data, and after years of research, there are still many undiscovered features of social media that can be used in emergencies. This paper aims to determine Southeast Asian countries' readiness to utilise social media for DRR activities and understand the criteria of DHN by integrating crisis mapping. A qualitative research design is applied to gain an insight into the humanitarian disaster network for disaster risk reduction. Data were collected through document analysis. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship. The study concluded that DHN provides a collaborative environment for the organizations to collaborate and act fast to assist.

Digital humanitarians for the Sustainable Development Goals: YouthMappers as a hybrid movement

ABSTRACT Emerging youth movements to promote issues reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are celebrated as critical for the future attainment of societal aims. We explore the possibility for institutions of higher education to serve as an intentional third space to engender the creation and mobilization of hybrid movements that intentionally engage youth internationally. This case study interrogates the YouthMappers digital humanitarian mapping model of student-led, faculty-mentored, globally-networked chapters through a global survey of 205 participating students from 32 countries. Results indicate the extent to which youth reflect on skill-development versus global citizenship, and how they understand the meanings of their actions for SDGs, locally and globally. Detected differences by gender, world region, and duration of participation are interpreted and validated with additional qualitative data. We conclude with observations about how universities can open enabling spaces for youth action on SDGs.

Deploying machine learning to assist digital humanitarians: making image annotation in OpenStreetMap more efficient

ABSTRACT Locating populations in rural areas of developing countries has attracted the attention of humanitarian mapping projects since it is important to plan actions that affect vulnerable areas. Recent efforts have tackled this problem as the detection of buildings in aerial images. However, the quality and the amount of rural building annotated data in open mapping services like OpenStreetMap (OSM) is not sufficient for training accurate models for such detection. Although these methods have the potential of aiding in the update of rural building information, they are not accurate enough to automatically update the rural building maps. In this paper, we explore a human-computer interaction approach and propose an interactive method to support and optimize the work of volunteers in OSM. The user is asked to verify/correct the annotation of selected tiles during several iterations and therefore improving the model with the new annotated data. The experimental results, with simulated and real user annotation corrections, show that the proposed method greatly reduces the amount of data that the volunteers of OSM need to verify/correct. The proposed methodology could benefit humanitarian mapping projects, not only by making more efficient the process of annotation but also by improving the engagement of volunteers.

A survey of social media use in emergency situations: A literature review

This study reviews literature on the use of Social Media (SM) in emergency response operations while identifying gaps in this research stream that need attention from Information Systems (IS) researchers. The research is grounded in past works and attempts to build on research on the application of SM in emergencies. It focuses on understanding the role of SM in the prevention, management and response to emergencies. The review contains a detailed literature exposition of IS and disasters journals. The appraisal of such research stream led the review to focus on the concept of digital volunteerism as an offshoot of crowdsourcing initiatives. Findings from the review reveal that previous studies overlooked the interfacing challenges between formal and traditional aid agencies on one hand and digital humanitarians on the other. Consequently, we identify gaps in the extant literature and propose areas of interest for future research.

International Human Rights Framework to Disaster Management

In recent decades, there has been growing awareness of the relevance of international human rights law to protect, prevent, respond, recover and mitigate disasters. In many respects, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami marked a turning point in the international community’s views of disasters. Before the 2004 tsunami, disasters were primarily seen in terms of the need to mobilize rapid humanitarian aid, which usually entailed the prioritization of logistical and expertise personnel. A look at the international legal instruments dealing with disaster management shows that it has a complex link with human rights which necessitates striking a balance between public safety and individual rights. The digital age has also seen a revolution in every aspect of life including humanitarian actions, before, during and after a disaster, aimed at preventing, managing and mitigating the risks associated with disasters. This has created a complex link involving the flow of information and the rise of a new group of aid workers known as Digital Humanitarians. Despite all the new and positive promises offered by the digital age, the population still faces many challenges relating to ICT. Thus the continued articulation, application and integration of human rights into humanitarian aid and how humanitarians apply technology is consistently proving to be the correct pathway to render justice to victims. While disaster management is becoming more complex especially in the digital age there is a need for more attention in developing the best practices in applying a rights-based approach, before, during and after a disaster.

Digital Volunteer Networks and Humanitarian Crisis Reporting

Digital technologies and big data are rapidly transforming humanitarian crisis response and changing the traditional roles and powers of its actors. This article looks at a particular aspect of this transformation—the appearance of digital volunteer networks—and explores their potential to act as a new source for media coverage, in addition to their already established role as emergency response supporters. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access, while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship and exceeding the conventional conceptualizations of citizen journalism. Journalists can find both challenges and opportunities in the environment where multiple crisis actors are assuming some of the media roles. The article draws on interviews with humanitarian organizations, journalists, and digital volunteer networks about their understanding of digital humanitarian communication and its significance for media coverage of crises.

Datafying Disaster: Institutional Framings of Data Production Following Superstorm Sandy

In the wake of disasters, communities organize to produce spatial data capturing knowledge about the disaster and to fill gaps left by formal emergency responders. The ways in which communities affect overall response efforts can produce inequalities, disempowerment, or further marginalization. Increasingly, this organizing and knowledge production occurs through digital technologies and, recently, digital humanitarianism has become an important suite of such technologies. Digital humanitarianism includes technologies like the crowd-sourced crisis mapping platform Ushahidi and the community of volunteers Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which focuses on the amateur-generated global base map OpenStreetMap. Digital humanitarianism is shifting how needs and knowledges are captured and represented as data following disasters. These transformations raise important questions for geographers interested in the sociopolitical and institutional processes that frame data production and representation. In this article, I contribute to geographers' efforts to understand the institutional and community-based politics that frame the types of data that are produced in disaster contexts by drawing on an ethnographic project that took place in both Washington, DC, and New York City after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. I show that digital humanitarians produced data in the Rockaway Peninsula of New York in response to perceived gaps on the part of formal emergency responders. In so doing, they represented needs, individuals, and communities in ways that local community advocacy organizations found problematic. These findings shed light on the politics and struggles around why particular data sets were produced and the motives behind capturing particular disaster-related needs and knowledge as data.

Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response

This is a review of Patrick Meier’s 2015 book, Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. The book explores the role of technologies such as high-resolution satellite imagery, online social media, drones, and artificial intelligence in humanitarian responses during disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In this analysis, the book is examined using a humanitarian health ethics perspective.

Digital Humanitarians

Eyewitness user-generated content has dominated the study of citizen journalism in crisis and conflict zones. However, the convergence of online networked technologies, like social media, collaborative mapping and real-time information management, gives ordinary people the capacity to commit acts of journalism from afar. Networks of virtual volunteers act as digital humanitarians who rapidly assemble situational awareness at the onset of natural and human-caused disasters through crowdsourcing, data analysis and crisis mapping to aid on-the-ground emergency response. While they have been studied through the multi-disciplinary lens of information science, computation, geography and emergency management, digital humanitarians have received little attention in the journalism literature. This exploratory study contends that the knowledge-based content produced by these groups is citizen journalism akin to data-driven investigative news. Two case studies and a cross-case analysis consider this argument through digital humanitarian work of the Standby Task Force on the 2015 European refugee crisis and the 2016 earthquake in Ecuador. These and other emerging crisis/conflict zone examples suggest a broader perspective is needed on citizen journalism not bounded by eyewitness user-generated content. Future research directions to explore digital humanitarianism as a form of citizen journalism are also offered.

Leading Digital Humanitarians: An Exploratory Study on Establishing and Maintaining Effective Leadership Roles during a Crisis Event in the Standby Task Force Online Community

Leading Digital Humanitarians: An Exploratory Study on Establishing and Maintaining Effective Leadership Roles during a Crisis Event in the Standby Task Force Online Community

CrowdAR: A Live Video Annotation Tool for Rapid Mapping

Digital Humanitarians are a powerful and effective resource to analyse the vast amounts of data that disasters generate. Aerial vehicles are increasingly being used for gathering high resolution imagery of affected areas, but require a lot of effort to effectively analyse, typically taking days to complete. We introduce CrowdAR, a real-time crowdsourcing platform that tags live footage from aerial vehicles flown during disasters. CrowdAR enables the analysis of footage within minutes, can rapidly plot snippets of the video onto a map, and can reduce the cognitive load of pilots by augmenting their live video feed with crowd annotations.

Geography of Solidarity: Spatial and Temporal Patterns

Crowdsourcing technologies represent a paradigm shift in the way certain tasks are performed. Linux, Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap represent massive achievements that are changing our access to open software technology, knowledge and geoservices. These changes have also reached humanitarian response in front of man-made or natural disasters: digital humanitarians (DH) are given the chance to remotely help out those in urgent need, by accomplishing thousands of microtasks that augment the information about the disaster for those who work on the ground. However, the organisers and designers of these complex technological platforms need also to consider how to achieve larger, better, faster humanitarian reaction; as well as how to build, expand and maintain a volunteer community. This paper studies the temporal and geographical patterns of past online humanitarian response, and attempts to find clues that optimize the potentialities of a DH platform.Our findings suggest that the volunteers are strongly committed to the tasks: their contributions are submitted at a very fast pace, and they contribute repeatedly over time; also, such contribution is heavily driven by mass media coverage of the disaster: an increase in the media coverage is closely followed by an increase in the volunteers response. On the geographic side, there are large asymmetries regarding the origin of contributions, with a clear skew towards English-speaking areas.All these analysis outcomes inform us about human activity temporal and temporal patterns in very specific, unexplored context –time-constrained task accomplishing; additionally, such outcomes should rigorously inform future humanitarian technologies, and associated activities.

Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: practices, epistemologies, and social relations

Spatial technologies and the organizations around them, such as the Standby Task Force and Ushahidi, are increasingly changing the ways crises and emergencies are addressed. Within digital humanitarianism, Big Data has featured strongly in recent efforts to improve digital humanitarian work. This shift toward social media and other Big Data sources has entailed unexamined assumptions about technological progress, social change, and the kinds of knowledge captured by data. These assumptions stand in tension with critical geographic scholarship, and in particular critical GIS research. In this paper I borrow from critical research on technologies to engage three important new facets of Big Data emerging from an interrogation of digital humanitarianism. I argue first that within digital humanitarianism, Big Data should be understood as a new set of practices, in addition to its usual conception as data and analytics technologies. Second, I argue that Big Data constitutes a distinct epistemology that obscures many forms of knowledge in crises and emergencies and produces a limited understanding of how a crisis is unfolding. Third, I argue that Big Data is constitutive of a social relation in which both the formal humanitarian sector and “victims” of crises are in need of the services and labor that can be provided by digital humanitarians.