TACLOBAN, Philippines – Technology has drastically altered the way in which the world responds to disasters, such as the super typhoon that devastated more than 9 million people across the Philippines last week. Digital humanitarianism has been on the rise since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and has since become more efficient and effective.
Digital crisis mapping methods experienced limited success in Libya. During the 2011 political upheavals, the UN partnered with the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) – a digital humanitarianism coalition – to track violence and escalations. While the ability to analyze data and coordinate efforts across more than 80 countries proved impressive, STBF’s Meier told Wired that the manual labor overwhelmed volunteers. Thus, SBTF and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) set out to create more efficient, comprehensive ways to evaluate all of the thousands of tweets, images, and online reports that appear during and after emergencies.
This past September, QCRI revealed its Clickers – web-based microtasking apps – in response to the earthquake in Pakistan. The purpose of such apps “is to quickly make sense of all the user-generated, multi-media content posted on social media during disasters,” Meier told iRevolution. The Clickers – TweetClicker, TweetGeoClicker, ImageClicker and ImageGeoClicker – help government and relief agencies determine where aid is needed the most. Tweets are automatically uploaded to TweetClicker and those with images filter into ImageClicker. From there, the tweets and images are tagged based on the messages they contain – such as calls for help or reports of infrastructure damage. The result is a comprehensive crisis map detailing the severity and topology of the disaster.
The rapid speed at which data can be collected is what makes the Clickers so valuable. In Pakistan, volunteers collected and analyzed more than 14,000 tweets and 341 images within the first 30 hours after the earthquake. While the UN usually takes about five to seven days to assess a disaster, Clickers and web-based crisis mapping shrink that down to two. The less time spent calculating the damage equals more time spent saving lives.
Clickers and digital crisis mapping have revolutionized disaster response in the Philippines. The day before the typhoon touched down, the UN reached out to the Digital Humanitarianism Network (DHN) – a digital aid consortium and QCRI and SBTF partner – to begin mapping Haiyan’s impact. Utilizing the ImageGeoClicker, tweets and images were translated to a crisis map in real-time, a platform called MicroMapping. The results were paramount. Within a 48-hour period, volunteers collected more than 200,000 tweets, filtered these down to a concise 35,000 and used these to create an exhaustive crisis map for the UN.
The success of digital mapping poses a threat to physical agencies, as power shifts away from headquarters to the computer and social media interfaces. As Time reports, however, it is a shift that aid agencies must accept: “Aid agencies may have no choice but to follow the wave of digital innovation–or risk leaving not just themselves, but those in disaster zones behind.”
– Mallory Thayer
Sources: Time, Wired, iRevolution
Photo: MicroMappers