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Introducing MicroMappers for Digital Disaster Response
Micromaps = micropolitics? Patrick Meier discusses digital disaster response over at iRevolution.
The UN activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) on December 3, 2012 to carry out a rapid damage needs assessment in response to Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines. More specifically, the UN requested that Digital Humanitarians collect and geo-reference all tweets with links to pictures or video footage capturing Typhoon damage. To complete this mission, I reached out to my colleagues at CrowdCrafting. Together, we customized a microtasking app to filter, classify and geo-reference thousands of tweets. This type of rapid damage assessment request was the first of its kind, which means that setting up the appropriate workflows and technologies took a while, leaving less time for the tagging, verification and analysis of the multimedia content pointed to in the disaster tweets. Such is the nature of innovation; optimization takes place through iteration and learning.
Microtasking is key to the future of digital humanitarian response, which is…
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Google Map Maker Comes to the UK I
Users in the UK can now do all the things they could do on OSM (!) now on Google Maps with it’s ‘Map Maker’ tool. Map Maker ‘Pulse’ is a live window of these map edits. Users can add new places, roads, rivers, building outlines, natural features and boundaries as well as editing existing places, line features, road segments and directions.
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Walls
Jonathan Olley from Castles of Ulster. Forkhill Security force base Forkhill, South Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK. Two videos have made their way into the BBC’s most watched list today both on boundary walls. The first sees Frank Gardner head to Saudi Arabia where they’re in the process of sealing the ‘troubled’ border with Yemen across a 1,000 mile stretch. The second marks 15 years since the Good Friday Agreement with a discussion of the ‘Peace Walls’ that divide Northern Ireland along religious lines.
Each time I return to thinking about politics, territory and space I think of Jonathan Olley’s majestic Castles of Ulster photography project. The photo above is from this very series (a short review in the Guardian from 2007 is here). I saw a selection of them at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and was blown away by their composition. They really do capture everything that is haunting about military occupation, boundary-making and the sheer architectural brutality of territorial dispute.
A corrected in-press version of a Political Geography paper on ‘Interventions in the political geography of walls’ (subs. only) by Karen Till and a selection of other authors is a handy guide to reading all the above together.
Sam Hind 