Patrick Meier's new book, titled "Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response" tells "the compelling story of how mobile technologies, computer applications, and vast quantities of digital data work in concert with a dedicated global network of new humanitarians ready to shed light on disaster-affected areas in hours, not days and weeks" and examines how the "overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information .. making sense of Big Crisis Data is proving to be an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations, which is precisely why they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians."
Patrick devotes several pages to the evolving role of GDELT in humanitarian response, describing it as "The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone is the ultimate data fusion engine for all digital news articles produced on the planet every hour of every day. … Thanks this data fusion project, the pulse of all digitally produced news on the planet is now available at our fingertips in the form of a single, publicly accessible database."
Patrick is one of the pioneers of digital humanitarian response and his book looks to be a fantastic read! We're tremendously honored to have been mentioned in Patrick's book and look forward to some exciting collaborations in 2015 to really push the boundaries of how GDELT can help provide new kinds of monitoring capacity and insight into rapidly evolving humanitarian disasters.