Ushahidi at the Google interface: critiquing the ‘geospatial visualization of testimony’

Abstract

The recent explosion of mobile media has coincided with a growing interest in crisis mapping, a practice that blends the technical capabilities of sites like Google Earth with politically inflected attempts at geospatial visualization. Non-profit organizations such as Kenyan-based Ushahidi have mobilized these technologies in order to visualize various natural catastrophes and political atrocities in spatial terms, drawing upon the testimonies of diverse witnesses – witnesses often equipped with nothing more than their mobile phones. Yet, these organizations' increasingly global agendas should be scrutinized. While Ushahidi brands itself as an activist group dedicated to the ‘geospatial visualization of testimony’, this non-profit corporation's repeated reliance on Google's corporate humanitarianism raises questions about the efficacy of an initiative that operates from the ‘top-down’. While Ushahidi did and still does allow for the geospatial visualization of testimony, this non-profit corporation also illuminates the problems with deploying GIS to political ends, especially across disparate cultural and national contexts.

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Lindsay Palmer

Lindsay Palmer is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in Genders, Feminist Review, and Television and New Media. Lindsay would like to thank her anonymous peer reviewers and Anna Everett for their advice on this article in its various stages.