We have in fact proven it!

The system we designed for two of the leading HR advocacy organisations has logged (really sadly – this is home after all) over 1,000 incidents dating back to April 2007 and mostly in the N/E.

It’s one thing to read it on paper, another really to see it visualised in any number of ways graphically (pie / scatter / line broken by violation, identity group, age etc), though stuff like regression analysis and timeline based animations are still in the works.

We can prove it because the organisations concerned were fairly bloody disorganised in data storage (a mix of Word, Excel and Access data – a fucking nightmare) but accurate in terms of logging the locations of violations over the years.

GPS phones are too expensive at the moment and the built in GPS services in all mobiles are just too inaccurate for meaningful readings (+/- 1000m or more).

Again, as I note in my post, for most HR advocacy (understood here as mainstreaming HR to the larger peace process + negotiations, raising awareness of HR violations, using reports for bilateral meetings with stakeholders including non-state actors, sit-reps and snapshots of a situ in a particular region and historical antecedents etc) don’t need 100% accurate GPS coordinates. Legal prosecution requires a higher degree of accuracy, but anyone who suggests that such prosecution can take place at a time of war is quite simply someone who has experienced violent conflict – Silent enim leges inter arma!

Multiple layers are useful even if all the data IS NOT captured on same layer. The secret is translucency – for example say an electoral map over a P-Codes or postal code map. One laid over the other can bring up some interesting points for discussion and also further aid in identifying duplicates and related incidents. Fairly standard stuff.

Competing notions of place have to be negotiated and an understanding arrived as to what exactly is meant for cases where it matters. Again, these are a few cases were the exact geographical location is of vital significance (e.g. was it within a High Security Zone of an Army Camp or just outside it). Some of these cases can never be resolved – because the victim’s memory of place is just too scarred by the trauma to accurately point out again. In other cases, maps that are not now in the public domain can be used. In a few cases, there may be witnesses who can help locate the precise place, or even some physical markers of the location (e.g. a banyan tree, a cave). But the thing is that these are a few of the most difficult cases – for most of the HR violations, we in Sri Lanka have a place and other data.

Our challenge was to build a system for two agencies in the first instance that would significantly strengthen their HR advocacy work. It’s their challenge to record the violations in a manner that will ultimately help brings the bastards responsible for the violations to book.

Sanjana

On your comments – we agree that there are obstacles to precise geolocation in many cases, but that’s exactly the point – how do we deal with those obstacles? The place names issue is a critical one, but the solution is co-ordinates. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to walk around with GPS (although obviously that would help, and GPS-enabled cellphones are one way of making it less obvious) but it does mean better analysis during the data entry process.

When you say “It’s a given that there have been more HR violations in cities in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka than, say, for any city in the South over the 25 years of conflict”, my response is – prove it. The more accurate your location information, the better the evidence that supports advocacy, and if the location information is poor it undermines the credibility of the statement. (Note: I’m not contesting the statement itself.)

Multiple layers are fairly standard in most GIS work, but unless all of your data is captured on the same layer, then you’re going to face serious problems comparing different datasets. In the case of the work that Tom was talking about, everybody feeding into the system has to be working to the same standard, otherwise we run into the apples and oranges problem. Place may mean different things at different times, but if everybody has their own notion of what constitutes a “place” then I’m not sure any system would be able to cope with it.