Date: December 1st, 2007

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Dear readers,


In this issue we will be reviewing a fantastic mapping tool called the "World Freedom Atlas". Its both very beautiful and wonderfully useful. We will be interviewing its creator, Zachary, Johnson, and you will be amazed to learn that he put it together with practically no money, but lots of hard work.

We will also be having a review of some of the best posts from our bloggers community, carefully selected by Helene Hedberg, which we are sure you will enjoy.

As many of you have realized, this is not a regular newsletter, we publish only when we have something to say. We make no promises, and you may not hear from us for months! So we hope you will enjoy this issue and read it attentively, because even we don't know when you will get the next one!

Some announcements to start:



ANNOUNCEMENTS: TRAINING AND EDUCATION


The University of Sydney now has an interdisciplinary MA in Human Rights:

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/ssp/postgraduate/?part=overview&id=dc055

We asked the programme's director, Dr. Danielle Celermajer, what is special about it. She replies:

"At Sydney, we’ve taken on board the fact that human rights is not just a legal discourse, and not just a political discourse, but a topic that a number of disciplines have something important to say about. In practical terms, that means that our courses are taught across 6 faculties, taking into account legal, philosophical, sociological, environmental, cultural and economic perspectives, and making the links between human rights and other critical areas of concern like bio-ethics and global warming. What we have in mind in this degree is not just conveying the body of existing knowledge, but equipping students to become people who can take human rights into new areas and develop the field; they will be the leaders of the future.

We’ve also included an internship option so students can actually go out and be members of working human rights organizations in Australia and in the Asian region and develop their practice skills, which will be critical to their future career opportunities."

Of course, we could also mention that Sydney is a very nice place to live and study!



ANNOUNCEMENTS: TOOLS AND RESOURCES

ILO: New resource guide on disability
This guide is a starting point for anyone beginning research on disability. It provides links to key ILO publications on the topic, ILO labour standards and data, as well as to other resources around the world. This guide was produced in cooperation with the ILO's Skills and Employability Department.
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/support/lib/resource/subject/disability.htm

IPIECA: Human Rights Training Toolkit for the Oil and Gas Industry
Jenny Owens, project manager for social responsibility at IPIECA, wrote to tell us about this very toolkit. It destined to help managers in the oil sector to make human rights-sensitive decisions. We were impressed by the quality of the pedagogy. The trainer manual makes a very effective use of scenarios and dilemmes for discussion. These scenarios make it possible to jump straight into the most thorny issues: how to avoid complicity with a government with a bad human rights records, how to manage relations with local communities. Available in English and French.
http://www.ipieca.org/activities/social/social_hr.php#hftt


BEST OF THE BLOGS

A review of the most interesting posts from our comminity of 50+ human rights blogs, by community animator Helene Hedberg:

Hello fellow friends and Human Rights bloggers! So I’ve been checking out some blogs and here is what’s new from some of them:

Intercontinental Cry
Is dedicated to informing people about the many historical, ongoing, and emerging problems of indiegnous peoples throughout the world. Its recent post from the 26th of November includes a report on the ousting of Australia’s racist government. Congratulating the voters for doing a good job, voting against Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough and Prime Minister John Howard, it also includes some doubts about whether or not the new government will stop the intervention of Indigenous people in the northern territory. With hope though it is expressed that the new government will possibly sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Check out the blog, even though it’s run by just one person it is frequently updated, very well elaborated and provides access to a great deal of valuable information, links, videos etc.
http://intercontinentalcry.org


Rightsbase
Another interesting blog run by Olivia Ball. Her intention is to address just about any topic, but from a human rights perspective. Something we could all take into account. Her post from the 10th of November looks into how “Blix envisages peace through globalization”. Here she writes about that Hans Blix, foremost known as the weapon inspector of Iraq prior to the current war, recently was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Including an excerpt from his acceptance speech, Blix had concluded like Dag Hammarskjöl a couple of years earlier; “The UN will not take us to heaven, but it might help us to avoid hell”. The blog contains some useful links and literature suggestions. Pay it a visit.
http://blog.rightsbase.org

The UUSC Hotwire
Is a human rights weblog of the unitarian universalist service committee. A nonsectarian organization that advances human rights and social justice in the United States and around the world. Their latest post from the 24th of November deals with the situation where Muslim women are being enforced to wear headscarves. The criticism put forward is done with realization of- and respect for the Muslim women wearing it as a sign of religious devotion, which they have freely chosen. What is put forward here by Lauri Brunner, as she tells us about her visit to Aceh, is the danger of the scarves becoming a “fabric of oppression” in Indonesia as it has in Pakistan when the women are in risk of getting detention or caning for not wearing it. Check out the blog to read more on interesting and important topics.
http://www.uusc.org/blog/hotwire.html

Also, I’ve just updated my blog with some feedback on the human rights event I recently attended:
http://undialogue.blogspot.com

That’s it for now! Keep up the good work! And please let me know if there is a blog to add to the community: helene@humanrightstools.org


MAIN FEATURE: HUMAN RIGHTS MAPS

We were really amazed by the World Freedom Atlas you have put together. Its really useful, contains a host of data, and is also very beautifully executed.

We recommend to take some minutes to explore it, before reading further:
http://www.freedom.indiemaps.com

There is a wide range of data you can visualize, from Freedom House's indicators on civil and political rights, to the Human Development Index, to Transparency International's corruption data, to Reporters with out Borders' Press Freedom Index.

What is even more impressive is that it was made by a student, completed over a summer as part of a university project! (for this course: http://www.geography.wisc.edu/~harrower/Geog575/).

We caught up with the creator of this wonderful atlas, Zachary Johnson, for an email interview:

Editor: How is this website meant to be used? What kind of information does it provide?

Zachary: I initially aimed the World Freedom Atlas at scholars and NGO/IGO workers who already work with the datasets I've included. I hope people use it to explore the data, ask questions, and do some initial analysis. I really don't expect the atlas to necessarily answer questions -- that's not what geovisualization is all about. Rather, I hope it raises issues and awareness and compels users to further explore the complex issues of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The data are of course available online, and many of the original data providers (Freedom House, Transparency International, etc.) even provide some maps on their websites. As I cartographer, though, I was generally dissatisfied with these maps. Plus, I wanted them to be available all in one place, rather that dispersed across cyberspace.

Editor: How is it done, technically? How do you keep it up to date? Was it difficult to find all the datasets and put them together? How long did it take you?

Zachary: I really improved my programming skills during the 6 months I worked on the World Freedom Atlas. It was done in Flash 8 using its programming language Actionscript 2. The data are stored in a single table in a mySQL database and I use AMFPHP (a group of classes written in the PHP programming language) and some of my own PHP scripts to go back-and-forth between the Flash app and the database (when the user requests a specific variable to be mapped).

Right now the database and application are set up quite flexibly. So if I want to add a new variable or update an existing one, it only takes a few steps and the application will update automatically. Unfortunately I haven't had much time lately to do even these few steps, so there may be a few datasets in need of updating. A couple months into the production of the atlas I discovered the Quality of Governance Institute, a Swedish organization affiliated w ith Göteborg University. They release and constantly update a huge dataset with time series data going back to 1946. I chose to load their entire dataset into my application, though I only go back as far as 1990. I definitely owe a lot to the QoG for collecting and disseminating this dataset. That said, it still took a lot of work to get it into a form usable by Flash, and to import such a huge file into a mySQL table.

I can't even estimate how long it took me to complete. This has been my baby for the past 6 months, and there have been many nights working past 3am on it. Definitely over a hundred hours, and quite possibly over 200. I've also been working on many other projects, taking classes, and (sort of) working on my thesis at the same time, so the atlas has had to take a backseat at some times.


Editor: Tell us a bit about yourself, and why you did this. What kind of financing did you have?

Zachary: This began as a class project for an interactive mapping course at the University of Wisconsin taught by Professor Mark Harrower. We produced a very limited version of the atlas (using only Freedom House data) and turned it in in May. My group-mates gladly turned the atlas over to me and I chose to completely redesign it and repurpose it as a more general geovisualization application for data related to good governance.

So it was a completely independent project. There was no financing whatsoever and I haven't made a dime off of it (and don't plan to, though it will obviously be a very large portfolio piece for me when I'm looking for other, paying clients).


Editor: What is your next project? If you had a million dollars to spend on a nonprofit idea, what would that be?

Zachary: I'm currently working on a couple interactive projects, but these will finish up in December. Those interested can check out my website, indiemaps.com. I really want to continue working on areas related to human rights, population studies, or environmental justice. I'm still looking around for my next project (though I really should finish up my Master's thesis sometime...).

If I had a ton of funding to produce a non-profit application of my choosing, I would likely create some type of web-based Flash GIS application, into which all sorts of users could easily load in and explore their own data, be it about human rights or environmental degradation. Current GIS software is quite powerful, but also very expensive and typically quite hard to use. A Flash-based GIS could incorporate very nice interface design and complete access to anyone with a web browser.


Editor: What are your favorite blogs, websites?

Zachary: I mostly read blogs related to programming, cartography, and information visualization. My current favorites are tecznotes ( http://mike.teczno.com/notes/), Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/), and Information Aesthetics (http://infosthetics.com/). I am also quite politically active and read an assortment of political blogs and sites, both liberal and conservative, every morning with my coffee. The New York Times website is currently the leader in journalistic online mapping, and their site typically contains one or two new interactive infographics or maps each week. I should also plug my blog here (http://indiemaps.com/blog/), which I plan to keep active and which should be interesting to those who create, or are just interested in, these kinds of social data visualizations.


MORE HUMAN RIGHTS MAPS....

If you like human rights mapping, here are some more goodies to explore:

MapleCroft Maps
Already reviewed in a previous issue, this website provides a number of world maps. Each map allows you to visualize a particular human right of development issue: aid flows, water, military expendure, malaria, landmine risk... and many many more:
http://maps.maplecroft.com/
(also be sure to explore the cartograms at bottom of this page)

Raoul Wallenberg Institute: Human Rights Theme Maps
Good to visualize who is signatory to which treaty.
http://www.rwi.lu.se/tm/ThemeMaps.html

Gapminder
Hans Rosling and his team at Karolinska are experts at making statistical data talk in very evocative ways. Many of you have watched his Ted Talk videos:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140
Well, an online version of the Gapminder tool is now hosted by Google, so you can make similar presentations yourself!
http://tools.google.com/gapminder/
http://www.gapminder.org/

iQuango.org: Mellanrummet graphs
Sam Smith, inspired by Hans Rosling's Gapminder work, has taken the whole United Nations Common Database and parts of the CIA World Factbook and made it publicly available in Gapminder style. The interesting thing here is that the software running it - called "meinedata" - is freely available for anyone to use, improve, distribute.
http://www.iquango.org/mellanrummet/

European Statistical Laboratory's MDG dashboard
The MDG Dashboard presents the Millennium Development Goals indicators in a highly communicative format. This free database provides 60 MDG indicators for ca. 200 countries and 15 years (1990-2005) based on original United Nations statistics (updated in July 2007). Download the software to play on your computer:
http://esl.jrc.it/dc/index.htm

There are many more dashboards on this rich website, its a bit of a maze to navigate (to say the least...) but you will be surprised what you find. We liked the Fragile States Index: type the name of your country into the box and see how stable or unstable it is:
http://esl.jrc.it/dc/fsi_2007/index.htm
(more dashboards: http://esl.jrc.it/dc/dbgal_en.htm)



FINAL WORDS

Well, we hope you enjoyed this newsletter and found it useful. Please help us by
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That's all for now! Best regards and good luck in your efforts,

Daniel D'Esposito and Helene Hedberg




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