Meier P. Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response

CRC Press, 2014. — 259 p. — EISBN: 9781498726528Digital Humanitarians examines how new uses of technology and vast quantities of digital data are transforming the way societies prepare for, respond to, cope with, and ultimately understand humanitarian disasters.
There was a time when humanitarian response was the purview of an elite, hardened set of type A personalities devoted to saving the lives of those coping with the perils of major conflicts and disasters. These humanitarians were a class not dissimilar to the brave pioneers traveling west in search of adventure, forging new paths in the midst of contexts where there were few rules, many dangers, and where the rewards were great. For humanitarians, the reward of course was not gold or land, but the chance to make a diἀerence in the lives of countless of their fellow human beings beset by disaster. Yet, the tangible measures of their success were difficult to grasp. Stories of how many days these brave individuals went without sleep, showers, adequate food, and how they coped with a variety of diἀerent dangers created a picture of the context, but aἀorded little information about the eἀectiveness of the international humanitarian system, let alone the eἀorts of local communities in dealing with disaster.