Anticipating the future through vocabulary

A new database project attempts to identify impending genocide by spotting key textual indicators.  It’s crowdsourced, called Hatebase, and a co-sponsor describes it like so:

Hatebase, an authoritative, multilingual, usage-based repository of structured hate speech which data-driven NGOs can use to better contextualize conversations from known conflict zones.

A fascinating idea, one part digital humanities, one part pre-crime.  It can also be localized, as a

critical concept in Hatebase is regionality: users can associate hate speech with geography, thus building a parallel dataset of “sightings” which can be monitored for frequency, localization, migration, and transformation.

(via Slashdot; cross-posted to Scanning for Futures)