Visualizing the Killing of Women and Girls in Syria with WIRED UK
SumAll.org and Humanitarian Tracker teamed up with WIRED UK to visualize data about the killing of women and girls in Syria.
Image via WIRED UK
SumAll.org has been working with Humanitarian Tracker since early 2013 to analyze causes of death for civilians in the Syria crisis using crowdsourced and verified data. Our work was featured in the July 2014 issue of WIRED UK in an infographic titled War's Wheel of Destruction, which illustrates the causes of death for women and girls. The infographic highlights specific types of killings, identifying them as targeted attacks, in pink, or collateral damage, in yellow.
War's Wheel of Destruction from WIRED UK (July 2014).
Copy - Madhu Venkataramanan; Illustration - Signal Noise.
Crowdsourcing Crisis Data Collection
Crowdsourcing is all the rage. Yet while usually associated with funding creative projects or providing resources to students, crowdsourcing can also be leveraged as a critical tool in times of crisis. From the earthquake in Haiti to Hurricane Sandy, citizens and civic techies have joined together to use crowdsourcing as a way to quickly gather information in times of crisis. The data collected from these sources can send rapid alerts to humanitarian organizations, while also providing critical information for journalists, stakeholders and citizens.
SumAll.org's partner Humanitarian Tracker is a crowdsourcing initiative developed by Syrian-Americans based in the United States. Syria Tracker, a project of Humanitarian Tracker, has been crowdsourcing information on casualties in Syria since April 2011; they rely primarily on existing networks and organizations in Syria that submit online reports to their website. They also carry out data-mining of social media and produce separate aggregate reports on deaths and other violations. Syria Tracker makes all of its aggregated and disaggregated data available on its website.
For more information on female, and other, killings in Syria, see our white paper: Rising Proportion of Female Deaths in Syria and our interactive dashboard. Additional information on this project is available on SumAll.org's website.
Analytics on Violence in Syria Available to Stakeholders
SumAll.org and Humanitarian Tracker are offering in-depth analytics reports to those interested in the ongoing crisis
Image via ShoutOutUk
Since March of 2011, events in Syria have unfolded more violently than in other countries experiencing what has come to be known as the Arab Spring. What started out as demonstrations mirroring those that had begun in Tunisia in late 2010 and spread into Egypt in early 2011 soon turned into a violent armed conflict that has left over 100,000 dead, almost 5 million displaced, and nearly 3 million others fleeing the country.
Total Deaths in Syria
Click to view Interactive Syria Data
With the large amount of information coming out of Syria every day--whether from citizens, journalists, or official sources--it can be difficult to keep track of casualties and events. In an effort to provide reliable real-time data on the Syrian conflict, the SumAll Foundation has partnered with Humanitarian Tracker to offer access to data sets and analytics that provide insight into the fluctuating situation in Syria.
“We are thrilled about this partnership and the potential it can have on Syria’s future” explains Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, Founder and CEO of Humanitarian Tracker. "The goal of Humanitarian Tracker is to give a voice to those silenced by the conflict. Our partnership with SumAll will help amplify those voices, by making the influx of data coming out of Syria easy to understand."
Humanitarian Tracker, whose mission is to connect and empower citizens using innovation in technology to support humanitarian causes, provides the most complete and up to date crowdsourced dataset concerning events in Syria on the web.
"It is common for businesses to have real-time management dashboards for better decision-making. Surprisingly, the most pressing issues of our time don't have a dashboard." says Stefan Heeke, Executive Director of SumAll.org. The challenge is using that data to reach valuable insights and accurately communicate information. In order to do that, we aim to provide this publicly available Interactive Syria Crisis Dashboard for those interested in mining the very latest data first hand.
OUR PARTNERSHIP OFFER
For journalists who have specific questions that can be answered by further in-depth exploration, SumAll is offering a channel to investigate your research ideas and work with you to mine the most recent Humanitarian Tracker datasets. Our goal is to provide ad-hoc insights for data-driven journalists and political decision-makers. Please contact us for assistance.
DATABASE
Syriatracker: Documented Killings, News, Social Media Mentions
