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Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: practices, epistemologies, and social relations

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Abstract

Spatial technologies and the organizations around them, such as the Standby Task Force and Ushahidi, are increasingly changing the ways crises and emergencies are addressed. Within digital humanitarianism, Big Data has featured strongly in recent efforts to improve digital humanitarian work. This shift toward social media and other Big Data sources has entailed unexamined assumptions about technological progress, social change, and the kinds of knowledge captured by data. These assumptions stand in tension with critical geographic scholarship, and in particular critical GIS research. In this paper I borrow from critical research on technologies to engage three important new facets of Big Data emerging from an interrogation of digital humanitarianism. I argue first that within digital humanitarianism, Big Data should be understood as a new set of practices, in addition to its usual conception as data and analytics technologies. Second, I argue that Big Data constitutes a distinct epistemology that obscures many forms of knowledge in crises and emergencies and produces a limited understanding of how a crisis is unfolding. Third, I argue that Big Data is constitutive of a social relation in which both the formal humanitarian sector and “victims” of crises are in need of the services and labor that can be provided by digital humanitarians.

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Notes

  1. Within this emerging field there is significant overlap of many related concepts, including digital humanitarianism, Big Data, social media, and crowdsourcing, and the broader concepts of humanitarianism and development. In this paper I seek to be clear where debates explicitly revolve around one of these ideas, although the overlap between them allows for some analytical strength in ambiguity and generalization. While each of the concepts entails different processes, people interviewed for this research project tended to use them interchangeably, which reflects the persistently slippery nature of the concepts to date.

  2. To be sure, much research has shown that technologies are not determinant in their social and political implications; there is a social shaping of technology that can take their use in ways neither intended nor anticipated by those who developed them (Elwood 2006; Fischer 1994).

  3. MapAction, founded in 2003, is often credited as one of the first digital volunteer groups (Crowley and Chan 2011).

  4. See: http://www.mission4636.org/.

  5. Although Letouzé was writing about development rather than humanitarianism, I include it in this discussion because, while the two fields differ on their operations and intellectual histories, they share many of the same underlying assumptions. They share assumptions about who has resources and should deliver those to whom, they are traditionally based on economistic principles of resource distribution, and it can be said that their humanitarian/development situations often result from inequalities in global political economy. In Polman’s (2010) critique of humanitarianism, for example, she often looks at organizations straddling both sides of the humanitarian-development fence.

  6. As Kitchin (2013) has noted, however, conceptualizations of Big Data are inconsistent, adopting different tenets depending on the context.

  7. See: http://www.tomnod.com. Tomnod is a site that tracks a user’s contributions through a sort of individual profile. In the case of the recent “Wildfires in Australia” project, contributors sorted satellite imagery and were rewarded with increased “Cred”.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Smith Hall 408, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Ryan Burns

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Burns, R. Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: practices, epistemologies, and social relations. GeoJournal 80, 477–490 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9599-x

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