Counting the uncounted: Combining crowd and open source intelligence to report civilians deaths in war

The talk will explore how recent wars, in particular the international fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the first to be extensively documented en masse by civilians, militants and state militaries alike – all uploading content to the internet in near real-time. Despite populating the same social media platforms, these first hand testimonies of violence often go unseen by European users.

Taking as our focus, Airwars recent collaboration with Amnesty International that combined remote monitoring with crowdsourcing and field investigations, we will be discuss how social media is being instrumentalised to track civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria. We will ask how this has challenged the dominant narrative that the fight against ISIS – in which the Dutch played an active role – has been the “most precise war in history”? And, question the difficulties of working with a historic record threatened by erasure.

At the time of writing, the US-led Coalition has admitted to causing 1,257 civilian deaths during its four and a half year military campaign. Conversely, by remotely listening to local communities, Airwars has recorded over 28,000 alleged deaths – and places the minimum number of civilians likely killed by Coalition air and artillery strikes at 7,500 to 12,000. The Dutch state has ceded responsibility for three civilian harm incidents, however, will not say where, when or how many people were killed.

For these reason, civilians who have died in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria have been called the “uncounted”. What does it take to count the uncounted – to defend the dead?

04/05 WORKSHOP with Airwars 10:00-17:00

A practical introduction to working with open sources methods and materials. The focus will be the recent investigation by Airwars and Amnesty into civilian harm during the battle to retake Raqqa from the so-called Islamic State. We will look into social media as a source of reporting, try out geolocation and satellite image analysis all via public platforms. In the afternoon session we will experiment with the different ways (structural, visual, textual etc.) the body of research can be mobilised to tell new stories.

Practical

• Bring a laptop

• Download Google Earth Pro in advance

• Read trigger on distressing content

• Content warning: We will be working with real research materials from the war in Syria, some of which contain distressing content. As a policy, we will avoid graphic imagery.

Hanna Rullmann

Working as a researcher at Airwars, Hanna focuses mainly on geolocation and currently works closely with the Amnesty Crisis Response Team on archiving and visualising the Battle of Raqqa. Hanna recently completed a Masters at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, and prior to that worked as a researcher and graphic designer in The Netherlands.

Sophie Dyer

As a researcher at Airwars, Sophie’s advocacy work focuses on the reconciliation of the civilian casualty database with belligerent reporting, via direct engagement, analysis and modelling. She led the redesign of Airwars' public archive and recently worked with Amnesty International to investigate the civilian deaths during the 2017 Battle of Raqqa. Sophie studied at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, and has a background in Visual Communication. Prior to Airwars, she worked as a researcher and designer with Forensic Architecture amongst others.

Thursday Bite

Before the Thursday Night you can grab a bite to eat with the speakers and staff of Het Nieuwe Instituut. At 18:00 Het Nieuwe Café will serve a light vegetarian meal. Dinner vouchers are available for € 7.70 up to a day before the particular Thursday Night event via the Tickets link.

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