Monitoring Dangerous Speech: Umati Update

Lead by Kagonya Awori and Angela Crandall, the dedicated ihub Research team is monitoring and analyzing Dangerous Speech in Kenya with the Umati project. The Umati (the Swahili word for “crowd”) project coincides with the upcoming Kenyan Election and is connected to Ushahidi’s Uchaguzi plans. This groundbreaking research strategy for monitoring could be applied to a multitude situations. Here are some comparative results for October, November and December 2012. Reports will be provided until April. The team includes Human Monitors who review Facebook and Twitter (online content) in Swahili, English and vernacular languages.

Our flagship Umati project seeks to monitor and report the role of new media on an election. Our Kenya-based project has citizens at its core and uses relevant technologies to collect,organize, analyze, and disseminate the information collected...