Thomas Baar
How can we leverage the potential of (Big) Data for furthering Peace & Justice? Will more data allow us to improve policy responses to humanitarian crises and violent conflicts? Could digital technologies help us bring about sustainable development?
Big Data has often been described as a fuel for both innovation and our economy. It is being applied in many areas, for example financial markets, health and fast moving consumer goods. Within this lecture, we try to understand the hype around Big Data and explore how it could be used in order to confront complex societal challenges in the fields of sustainable development, humanitarian action as well as peace & justice.
Lecture Objectives
indication of key learning objectives on the basis of the lecture
- Appraise the concept of (Big) Data and identify its components;
- Assess the challenges in applying new types of data for confronting complex societal challenges within the domain of peace and justice;
- Recognise and explain the potential of the data revolution for peace and justice.
- UN Data Revolution (report)
- UN Global Pulse (website)
- Data for SDGs (website)
- Making the Invisible, Visible (UN OCHA)
- Taylor, Linnet, and Ralph Schroeder. "Is bigger better? The emergence of big data as a tool for international development policy." GeoJournal 80.4 (2015): 503-518.
- Leetaru, Kalev, "Why Big Data Missed the Early Warning Signs of Ebola." Foreign Policy.
- Giles, Jim. "Making the links." Nature 488.7412 (2012): 448-450.
- Lazer, David, et al. "Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science." Science (New York, NY) 323.5915 (2009): 721.
- Hans Rosling - 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
- Blauw, Sanne. "Deze 'hired gun' laat je voor altijd anders kijken naar data." De Correspondent.
- Jerven, Morten. "Poor numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it." Cornell University Press, 2013.