Fly Me to Darfur
In an exciting new use of technology to promote the cause of human rights, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has teamed up with Google to create the Darfur Mapping Initiative, an online information trove on the popular mapping site Google Earth.
This is an amazing interactive lesson on genocide. And it’s must-see for anyone interested in the intolerable situation in Sudan, where more than 300,000 people have
already been killed and 2.5 million victims driven from their homes.
If you don’t already have Google Earth on your desktop, you can download it for free by going to http://earth.google.com. The software isn’t hard to install, but it takes some patience to learn how to use it. It allows you to fly anywhere around the world and zoom into city streets and people’s backyards with fairly good resolution.
There are few bugs with the Darfur Mapping process. If you use Google Earth’s search template to navigate, you’re liable to get lost. When I tried to instruct the program to “Fly Me” to Darfur, I ended up in Dafur, Minnesota (Pop. 137), which looked like a typical Midwestern farming community. No genocide there, I pray. When I changed it to Darfur, Sudan, I landed back in Minnesota. (Note: This problem has been fixed since the Initiative's debut)
The trick is to input Sudan. That will get you to Africa after a brief flight. Zoom in on the “Crisis in Darfur” flag to get a tour of the devastation on the ground.
A legend will pop up instructing you how to click on the markers on the map to get information. The little flames will take you to the damaged and destroyed villages. The blue triangles tell you the names of the location and the number of displace people. The cameras will show you photographs.
It was a little clumsy at first, but I managed to click a camera that generated a gruesome photo called “Victims Outside Adwa.” I’ll leave the image to your imagination. From the triangle for Shangli Town, I learned that 19,494 residents had been displaced there. If you put a little time into it, you can check out data on refugees, see video clips and read testimony.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has turned the lesson of Europe’s historical shame into a powerful tool for understanding that the crime of genocide occurs with virtual impunity across the world today. I can only hope that the Museum and Google Earth will some day be flying us to other hot spots on earth where the bloodshed and the inhumanity are unfolding – in the early stages, when there’s time to intervene before the death toll rises.
#
This is an amazing interactive lesson on genocide. And it’s must-see for anyone interested in the intolerable situation in Sudan, where more than 300,000 people have
already been killed and 2.5 million victims driven from their homes.If you don’t already have Google Earth on your desktop, you can download it for free by going to http://earth.google.com. The software isn’t hard to install, but it takes some patience to learn how to use it. It allows you to fly anywhere around the world and zoom into city streets and people’s backyards with fairly good resolution.
There are few bugs with the Darfur Mapping process. If you use Google Earth’s search template to navigate, you’re liable to get lost. When I tried to instruct the program to “Fly Me” to Darfur, I ended up in Dafur, Minnesota (Pop. 137), which looked like a typical Midwestern farming community. No genocide there, I pray. When I changed it to Darfur, Sudan, I landed back in Minnesota. (Note: This problem has been fixed since the Initiative's debut)
The trick is to input Sudan. That will get you to Africa after a brief flight. Zoom in on the “Crisis in Darfur” flag to get a tour of the devastation on the ground.
A legend will pop up instructing you how to click on the markers on the map to get information. The little flames will take you to the damaged and destroyed villages. The blue triangles tell you the names of the location and the number of displace people. The cameras will show you photographs.
It was a little clumsy at first, but I managed to click a camera that generated a gruesome photo called “Victims Outside Adwa.” I’ll leave the image to your imagination. From the triangle for Shangli Town, I learned that 19,494 residents had been displaced there. If you put a little time into it, you can check out data on refugees, see video clips and read testimony.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has turned the lesson of Europe’s historical shame into a powerful tool for understanding that the crime of genocide occurs with virtual impunity across the world today. I can only hope that the Museum and Google Earth will some day be flying us to other hot spots on earth where the bloodshed and the inhumanity are unfolding – in the early stages, when there’s time to intervene before the death toll rises.
#
posted by Karl at 3:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home