Citizens around the world use crowdsourced platforms to hold governments accountable, to fill gaps in infrastructural and municipal services, and to call attention to issues that impact everyday lives, such as sexual violence and environmental injustice.
Crowdsourcing, Constructing and Collaborating brings together individuals and groups engaged in building and sustaining platforms for online collaboration and participation, to explore and reflect on the methods, challenges and potentials of the technology of crowdsourcing, and mapping of social impact. It brings together people directly involved in a range of projects from around the world—I Paid A Bribe, Environmental Justice Atlas, HarassMap, Intolerance Tracker, Visualizing Palestine, and Humanitarian Tracker—to critically reflect on the tactics, methods, challenges and opportunities of crowdsourcing and crowd-mapping as tools for social, environmental and political change.
In an accessible and visually engaging style, it shows how participatory digital media become crucial components of journalistic, scholarly and activist practices, addressing a range of topical challenges, including economic corruption, sexual harassment, political violence and environmental conflict, in diverse geographic contexts.
Introduction Siddharth Peter de Souza, Nida Rehman, Saba Sharma I: Mapping crises 1. Transforming the map? Examining the political and academic rigour of the Environmental Justice Atlas: Lena Weber, Leah Temper, Daniela Del Bene 2. Humanitarian Tracker: Crowdsourcing and Artificial Intelligence for social good: Hend Alhinnawi and Taha Kass-Hout 3. Interview: Mapping forgotten places around the world (Missing Maps): Jan Böhm with Siddharth Peter de Souza II: Contested territories 4. Placing Segregation:Rob Shepard 5. Archiving violence, understanding hate in South Asia with Intolerance Tracker: Siddharth Peter de Souza, Saba Sharma, Nida Rehman, Nooreen Reza 6. Interview: Advancing a factual, rights based narrative of Palestine and Palestinians (Palestine Open Maps): Ahmad Barclay with Siddharth Peter de Souza III. Feminist interventions 7. Mapping and stopping sexual harassment together: Rebecca Chiao, Farah Shash, Angie Abdelmonem, Noora Flinkman 8. Interview: Feminist solidarity through mapping (Fem Map): Juliana Guarany with Siddharth Peter de Souza IV: Civic engagements 9. Corruption and crowdsourcing: reflections on I Paid a Bribe: Sumit Arora, Sandhya D’Souza, Dheeman Ghosh 10. Interview: Streets and civic participation (FixMyStreet): Rebecca Rumbul with Nooreen Reza Afterword Shannon Mattern
Siddharth Peter de Souza is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law, Humboldt University of Berlin. Nida Rehman is the Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University. Saba Sharma is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.
