The Problem

Let’s start with “what is the problem I’m trying to solve here”.

I’m responsible for designing Hunchworks.

I’m a crisismapper. I’ve seen or worked on most crisis Ushahidi maps since January 2010, and I’ve watched the categories used on them split and evolve over time (from Haiti’s emergencies and public health to Snowmageddon’s problems / solutions and beyond).

Cat from Humanity Road has kept a screenshot of the categories on each of the main deployments since then – when I saw it today, it reminded me immediately of work that Global Pulse did on visualising category evolution across news articles, with articles as nodes connected by subject, and coloured by main category, as discovered by gisting the articles.

Except this time, we don’t have to guess the categories (although doing that later by mining text in the reports in each category could be fun).