Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relation

Burns, Ryan. 2014. Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relations. GeoJournal. (last accessed 10/15/2014).

14 Pages Posted: 17 Oct 2014

See all articles by Ryan Burns

Ryan Burns

University of Washington - Department of Geography

Date Written: October 12, 2014

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.

Keywords: Big Data, Digital humanitarianism, Geoweb, Critical GIS, Social media, Critical technology studies

Suggested Citation

Burns, Ryan, Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relation (October 12, 2014). Burns, Ryan. 2014. Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relations. GeoJournal. (last accessed 10/15/2014)., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2510449

Ryan Burns (Contact Author)

University of Washington - Department of Geography ( email )

Seattle, WA
United States

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