Book Review: Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is changing the face of humanitarian response | LSE Review of Books

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-05-15

Summary:

"Patrick Meier’s new book is a versatile, historical account of the birth of digital humanitarians. It takes a closer look at volunteers who mobilise online to support the activities of humanitarian organisations and gives a personal account of how he – as a scholar and practitioner – was drawn into digital humanitarianism. Also included is a best practice guide, which explores a series of useful tools and resources for those who wish to make sense of Big Data and use social media during crises and disasters. It additionally makes an open invitation for readers to become digital humanitarians. The book defines key terms in the field of digital humanitarianism and it does so using accessible language as, for example, demonstrated by the characterisation of OpenStreetMap as the ‘Wikipedia of maps.’ The book makes timely contributions in the key areas of privacy, the veracity of online information and the role of technology in digital humanitarian efforts. On privacy, Meier makes the important point that just because social media messages shared during crises and disasters are public, using them is not automatically ethical — social media users’ safety might be seriously compromised in some situations. He goes on to argue that we need to put social media content in context in order to assess its (in)accuracy, cross-referencing it with journalistic reports and information received via other crowdsourcing mechanisms like 999 in the United Kingdom (UK). The argument here is that misinformation will always exist, especially during in the early uses of a reporting mechanism, but this will likely change as people become better equipped to verify social media content. As for technology, while Meier retains a strong belief in its transformative potential during crises and disasters he acknowledges that technology will achieve little without people and policies to exploit their ‘affordances’. Successful digital humanitarian operations, such as the Haiti and Pablo responses discussed in the book, relied heavily on such resources. For example, he praises the decision of the Philippines government to advertise the different hashtags that people should use when tweeting about Typhoon Pablo ..."

Link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2015/05/12/book-review-digital-humanitarians-by-patrick-meier/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.book_review oa.psi oa.crowd oa.social_media oa.tools oa.government oa.data

Date tagged:

05/15/2015, 09:09

Date published:

05/15/2015, 05:09