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Satellite Human Rights and the importance of imagery

When my friend Janet Haven came to visit a few weeks ago, she came armed with a pair of images. Produced by mapping experts at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, they show Porta Farm, a large settlement in Zimbabwe just outside Harare in 2002 and again in 2006. In the four years between the image, thousands of structures, probably housing 6-10 thousand people have disappeared. They’re a powerful demonstration of the relocations of informal settlements implemented by the Mugabe government – Operation Murambatsvina. UN reports estimate than between 700,000 and 2.4 million Zimbabweans were moved from their homes as part of the operation, which many believe was designed to punish Mugabe’s political opponents. They’re also a powerful example of the impact geographic imagery can have on human rights cases.

I figured these were the sort of amazing pictures that you occasionally get to see in the course of doing the technology/activism/globalism work I do, but never get to blog. But the AAAS put out a press release yesterdayblogged by Jason Kottke – and are now flying around the web… which encouraged me to take a closer look at how one finds and analyzes images like these.

The source images for this analysis come from Digital Globe, a provider of satellite imagery to everyone from Google Earth to military and industrial users. Sources in Zimbabwe were able to give AAAS researchers accurate latitude and longitude coordinates for the farm – AAAS purchased high quality images from Digital Globe for the area near the coordinates, choosing images taken with a minimum of cloud cover, then used image processing techniques to identify the centers of structures, and statistical estimation techniques to estimate the population of the settlement.

The Digital Globe site isn’t nearly as easy to use as Google Earth (I get the sense their server may currently be swamped), but it provides imagery of parts of the world I’m interested in at much higher resolution than Google Earth does. Whether or not the costs of purchasing imagery like that shown by AAAS is prohibitively expensive for the amateur researcher, I don’t know – I’m currently trying and failing to purchase some images of Accra. But it’s fascinating to see the power of these images and to think about some of the changes one could document with comparative satellite imagery.

3 thoughts on “Satellite Human Rights and the importance of imagery”

  1. Pingback: Ogle Earth

  2. do you have any thing that will help me with these
    Questions

    1. What types of abuses and discriminations do the white Zimbabweans have to face?
    2. Why were the white Zimbabweans discriminated against?
    3. How people fought for the human rights in Zimbabwe?
    4. How the white Zimbabweans situation has changed (or not) since fighting for their rights?
    5. What the government of the country does (or should do) to protect the human rights of the white Zimbabweans?
    6. Why the white Zimbabweans?
    7. Why has the government killed the white farm owners and not the black?
    8. Does killing the white Zimbabweans affect the population?
    9. What types of groups are the fighting to stop the killing of the white Zimbabwean farm owners?
    10. Has fighting for there human rights helped or not?
    11. Is there anything else the government of Zimbabwe should do to stop this?

    could you reply asap it is very urgent that you get back to me please its for a social studies assignment

  3. Pingback: …My heart’s in Accra » Mapping land distribution in Bahrain

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