rethinking knowledge politics through digital

humanitarianism

Ryan BurnsDept. of Geography, University of Washington

http://burnsr77.github.ioburnsr77@gmail.com

@burnsr77

Standby Task Force

Digital Humanitarian Network

Humanity Road

CrisisMappers

HumanitarianOpenStreetMap

Network

digital humanitarian organizationsRyan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver si t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver si t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

“…visible on the ground…” “…average person…”

“…my experience with communities… local people know very well where the main hazard zones are located… every year… ‘My father told me…”

…”would you see any relevance to develop classes for natural(and man-made?) hazards to be included in HOSM framework?”

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

“top-down information … place-based knowledge systems … counter intuitive to initiatives to 'democratize' data?”

“…we should aim at a fork-project…”

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenHazardMap

what are the sites of negotiation and contestation in digital humanitarian

technologies?

displace the visual artifact (map) from the primary site of knowledge

politics

digital humanitarian spaces constitute a distinct space worth exploring

knowledge politics occur in social processes prior to the map: coding, data structures, project planning

needs collection and processing

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

significance

the ways digital humanitarian technologies develop influences how they can be used in the future

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

we can learn a lot about society by interrogating our technologies

immediacy and impacts of humanitarian crises

seven-month research project at the Commons Lab, Wilson Center in Washington, DC

participant observationdata archiving

38 semi-structured in-depth interviews

codingmethods

hackathons ICS Training

transcription

themesanalysis

notesmemos

(source: http://youtu.be/vAUt7h4kk0A)

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

knowledge politicsmechanisms:

two: “taming” needs

three: responsibilization

one: actionability and utility

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver si t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

one: actionability and utilityJordan: [W]here we're a little not sure where this fits in, in the crowdsourcing sense, [is in] being able to take information from the public and use it for operational decisions - that's different. How do you feel about things? What are you concerned about? The issues we need to address when we talk to the public, that's one thing. But for them to provide us, in a crowdsourcing way, with operational information is the area I'm still struggling with. … But the perception of the danger - the operational issue of where is the fire - I don't think we're at a point where we can ask the public to pin on a map where they think the fire is, because we're going to get a lot of noise in there. It's really hard, even for seasoned firefighters, to look down a mountain and tell you how far away that is.

“…operational decisions…”

situated knowledges

“noise”

Incident Command System

expert vs. lay knowledges

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver si t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

Laurie Van Leuven:

“…we in emergency management need to filter those out and listen specifically to actionable pieces of content. So, we’ve got some work to do in how we can build a system to receive that information.”

Source: http://youtu.be/vAUt7h4kk0A

Kevin: “…let it sit…”

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

two: “taming” needs

paradox: digital humanitarianism derives its “value” from recruiting a potentially infinite number of knowledges, yet those knowledges but be abstracted, condensed, and categorized

actionable, usable, valuable

infinite knowledges

and perceptionstension

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

two: “taming” needsJeremy: “…taxonomically distort[ing] the data through categorization. … Categorization is forcing a level of pre-judgment that prevents the data from telling its own story. … You never, ever want to append or amend a primary source that's digitally collected. Because when you do that, you don't know what its significance is.”

“some … misclassification was deliberate in an attempt to move critical reports into what were perceived to be more closely monitored categories in order to improve the chance that the reports would trigger a response” (Morrow et al., 2011, pp. 24–25)

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

three: responsibilization

first: individual digital humanitarian collaborators

second: “victims” of crises

third: digital humanitarian organizations

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

source: http://crisismappersfletcher.wordpress.com/

three: responsibilization

first: individual digital humanitarian collaborators

second: “victims” of crises

third: digital humanitarian organizations

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

source: http://irevolution.net/2011/10/02/theorizing-ushahidi/

three: responsibilization

first: individual digital humanitarian collaborators

second: “victims” of crises

third: digital humanitarian organizations

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

summing up

knowledge politics are enacted before the visual artifact (design, coding, data model, categorization)

http://irevolution.net/2011/10/02/theorizing-ushahidi/

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o

we can understand new soci0-political relations by interrogating digital humanitarian technologies

three mechanisms of digital humanitarian knowledge politics: actionability/utility, “taming” needs, and responsibilization

Thank you!

http://irevolution.net/2011/10/02/theorizing-ushahidi/

Ryan Bur ns Uni ver s i t y of Washi ngt on ht t p: / / bur nsr 77. gi t hub. i o