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Exodus 2.0: crowdsourcing geographical and social trails of mass migration

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Abstract

The exodus of displaced populations is a recurring historical phenomenon, and the ongoing Syrian humanitarian crisis is its latest incarnation. During such mass migration events, information is an essential commodity. Of particular importance is geographical (e.g., pathways and refugee camps) and social (e.g., refugee activities and networking) information. Traditionally, such information had been produced and disseminated by authorities, but a new paradigm is emerging: Web 2.0 and mobile computing technologies enable the involved stakeholder communities to produce, access, and consume migration-related information. The purpose of this article is to put forward a new typology for understanding the factors around migration and to examine the potential of crowd-generated data—especially open data and volunteered geographic information—to study such events. Using the recent wave of migration to Europe from the Middle East and northern Africa as a case study, we examine how migration-related information can be dynamically mined and analyzed to study the migrants’ pathways from their home countries to their destination sites, as well as the conditions and activities that evolve during the migration process. These new data sources can provide a deeper and more fine-grained understanding of the migration process, often in real-time, and often through the eyes of the communities affected by it. Nevertheless, this also raises significant methodological and technical challenges for their future use associated with potential biases, data quality issues, and data processing.

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Fig. 1

(data from: UNHCR 2017a)

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(data from: The Migrants’ Files 2014; IOM 2016a)

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(source: Hu 2016)

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Notes

  1. For users interested in finding information on OSM user contributions, please visit https://hdyc.neis-one.org.

  2. For more information about mobile OSM editors, see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_editors.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for providing invaluable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and GeoInformation Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Troy Curry, Arie Croitoru, Andrew Crooks & Anthony Stefanidis

  2. Center for Geospatial Intelligence, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Arie Croitoru, Andrew Crooks & Anthony Stefanidis

  3. Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Andrew Crooks

  4. Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis (CINA) Center, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Anthony Stefanidis

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  1. Troy Curry
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Correspondence to Arie Croitoru.

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Curry, T., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A. et al. Exodus 2.0: crowdsourcing geographical and social trails of mass migration. J Geogr Syst 21, 161–187 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-018-0278-1

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