Not long ago, for techPresident, I wrote an article on "Using Data and Statistics to Bring Down Dictators". While researching for the article, I got in touch with Jay Aronson, the founder of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Human Rights Science. He pointed me to the work of another scholar, called Cristopher McNaboe, who was doing a great work in Atlanta, mapping the Syria crisis for the Carter Center. I had no room left to include another interview in the piece, but I made a quick note to myself to follow the trail as soon as possible.
And so I did. As the dedicated page on Carter Center's website says, the Syria Conflict Mapping Project is an initiative launched by the Center to examine the massive amounts of citizen-generated information related to the Syrian conflict that is available online. Posts on social media, among other things, help to details the growth of opposition armed groups in each governorate within Syria; show the current geographic delineation of pro and anti-government forces and provides up-to-date analysis on the current state of the conflict. Initially, the goal of the Syria conflict mapping project was to provide information to neutral parties working toward a peaceful end to the crisis. With no end in sight, providing information about the strength and location of armed groups in each region of Syria also helps humanitarian organizations to know where it's "safe" to operate and where it's not.
For more details, check the interview below:
How long have you been working on the Syria conflict mapping project and how it was born?
I’ve been working on the project for two years now, though it has evolved slowly over that time period. After noting how heavily social media was being used in the beginning of the Syrian conflict, I started applying social network analysis tools to analyze the relation between armed groups, activists, and funders while working as an intern at The Carter Center in February 2012. The initial report focused on a single armed group active in Homs during the siege of Baba Amro. Advancing from here, I began following thousands defections announced via social media and keeping tabs on the evolving networks between them.
By July, 2012, I’d recorded approximately 14,000 defectors and civilians having joined the opposition – and at a rate that showed no signs of slowing down. In December 2012, the Carter Center hired me to officially begin the “Syria Conflict Mapping Project.” The institutional support enabled me to hire a team of researchers who had been tracking armed group formations in a very high level of detail, and expand the scope of my analysis to include conflict events in addition to opposition structures. To date, we’ve tracked approximately 5,600 armed group and military council formations over the course of the conflict, representing approximately 100,000 fighters.
What the humanitarian benefits of this project could be?
As the Syrian conflict is the first conflict of its scale to have taken place in such a connected society (digitally speaking), few organizations (including humanitarian organizations) were prepared to effectively take advantage of the large amount of information available via social media. By taking on this task, The Carter Center been able to provide mediators and humanitarian organizations with a very high level of detail on the conflict. Humanitarian organizations trying to distribute aid within Syria can now query the Center’s database to learn which armed groups are operating in the area, how they relate to one another, what conflict events have taken place recently (on a near real-time basis), and more.
We are currently trying to establish collaborative relationships with more humanitarian organizations in order to share this information through the Center’s analytical platform. The hope is that the strong baseline of information collected by the Center can be built upon with supplementary information from conflict responders, we can build a database that is greater than the sum of its individual parts and thus improve our collective understanding of the needs of affected populations and how best to respond to them.
What about risks or side effects? Tracking some armed groups and revealing their size and their location it's something that could also be exploited by their opponents in the fight
This has been a concern of ours from the very beginning of this project. Though the information we collect is all publicly available information – armed groups are actively trying to tell people about their existence and their actions – we take every precaution to ensure that we protect all potentially sensitive information.
How do you choose sources to follow and how do you verify that what they say it's true? In other words, how you avoid the risk that they consciously publish false material in order to promote their own agenda?
The quality of information available via social media is of constant concern to us. Armed groups and activists regularly upload false or intentionally misleading information – and then there’s the question of information that isn’t even online. In general, the best way to address these issues is to follow everything in as comprehensive a manner as possible. By doing this, we have been able to recognize misinformation for what it is – for example, in late 2012, an armed group announced that it had surface to air missiles (which would have been a major development), but by following the history of aerial bombardments in the same area, we saw no decline in the frequency of attacks, and no reports of planes or helicopters being shot down – calling into question the existence of these weapons.
A little extra research showed that these weapons they had posted pictures of were training models and were not actually operational. Another way we address the issues of misinformation is by confirming reports with contacts within Syria whenever possible. We’ve done this on a number of occasions and consistently found that the information we had collected was representative and useful – if not 100% comprehensive.
Can you provide more details about your methodology?
Our methodology is not as technologically innovative as one might think… There are no quick fixes for collecting the types of information we have been recording. We use standard searches of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, we follow several social media news sites, and employ some data-mining automated searches of social media sites and blogs. At the end of the day, however, every piece of information we enter is viewed, structured, and recorded by a human analyst (it’s one of those 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration projects).
Early in the project I worked with an amazing programmer and analyst, Russell Shepherd, to develop a program allowing us to visualize network relations found in our data. This tool sped up analysis tremendously, and resulted in some excellent data visualizations. More recently, The Carter Center has benefited from a partnership with Palantir Technologies, who provided their analytical platform and a team of engineers to help us organize, analyze, and secure our growing database of information. The platform we use – Palantir Gotham – is one of the best analytical tools in existence today, and has already helped us find meaningful trends in our data that would otherwise have been lost in a series of disconnected network diagrams, Excel spreadsheets, and reports.
Do you plan to extend this kind of project also to other countries?
Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, the Syrian conflict is the first conflict of its scale to have taken place in such a connected society. It certainly won’t be the last. The Carter Center works in countries throughout the world and we are constantly seeking to improve our understanding of these situations. Recently I began looking into the ongoing protests in Venezuela to see if we might be able to apply similar methods and tools to help understand events in that country. While this effort was partially successful, and we were able to see a few emerging trends, it quickly became clear that not everyone engages online in the same way.
While Syrians tend to use Facebook and YouTube to share information, Venezuelans tend to use Zello, just as Chinese citizens tend to use Weibo, Americans Twitter, and so on. The online world may look similar whether we access it from South Korea or South Sudan, but the way in which we engage with it is still very much determined by our cultures and countries. Because of this, if we want to extend this project to other countries or other contexts, we will have to re-shape our methods and approaches to fit these cultural differences.
