yesterday’s post (voting still open, by the way) and will respond in due course, but in the meantime, let’s get back to all that development stuff, shall we? One of the most striking aspects of exploring the human impact of the global financial crisis and food price spike was the absence of realtime data: a shock happens, and we hear about certain variables – GDP, prices, even unemployment in some countries – in real time. But other aspects – especially the impact on the way people live their lives – take months or often years to emerge. We had a go at doing some realtime monitoring of, for example, the gender impact of the financial crisis, and (with IDS) the community impact of the price spike. What we haven’t done yet is harness the spread of mobiles and the internet in that task.
Step forward the UN. Here’s a fascinating ten minute presentation of five ground-breaking data crunching experiments from the UN’s Global
Pulse project, trying new ways to follow realtime events. The first uses mobile phones to survey wellbeing around the world as a first step to inform the design of more exhaustive surveys. Next up is using prices of online food (e.g. on developing country supermarket websites) as a low-cost, realtime way to follow food prices. Third is tracking shifts in global opinion by tracking news coverage via key words and phrases and watching how they evolve over time. Fourth shows how monitoring online conversations (eg blogs, twitter) can help follow unemployment trends – in the US the language of anger (and cancelling vacations) precedes job losses, whereas in Ireland it is talk of anxiety. Finally, the enthusiastic tweeters of Indonesia talk about food a lot, and the frequency pretty much matches food prices. Much more to come, with a focus on Indonesia and Uganda.
Please send links to your own favourite examples of this kind of exercise. [h/t Richard King]
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