- Seeing Conflict through Data: Visualising Peace Process Trajectories1 Crichton St, Edinburgh
Conflict seems ever-present at the moment. In too many places, wars and disputes flare up and rumble on, and peace-making efforts follow in their wake. But all too often, the vital evidence about what is happening can be hard to find and interpret.
Edinburgh DataVis Community is back with a talk from two researchers from the Peacerep project, a peace and conflict resolution evidence platform which seeks to collate and visualise this critical information.
Tomas Vancisin and Niamh Henry will talk about the aims of the multi-institution project, and give us a glimpse into how they display and make use of the wide variety of data they gather.
Description of the talk:
PeaceRep is building PeaceTech innovation focused on better data for supporting adaptive management of peace and transition processes. We are producing a state of the art method for measuring change across a portfolio of indicators, to support analysis of peace processes and implementation. As the cornerstone of our PeaceTech work, the PA-X Peace Agreements Database contains more than 2,000 peace agreements from peace processes between 1990 and 2022. PA-X data underpins a range of digital tools to support policy and practice, including visualisations, trackers, interactive timelines, infographics, and a mobile app.
In this event Tomas Vancisin and Niamh Henry will talk through the design and development of key PeaceRep visualisations that have had impact in the field of peace building to better understand trajectories of peace processes. This includes temporal, network, geospatial and combined visualisations.PeaceRep can be found at: https://peacerep.org
Niamh Henry is a Research Fellow in Data Engineering with the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Programme (PeaceRep) at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the organisation and extension of peace and conflict data and develops innovative PeaceTech tools to support better understanding peace and transition processes. Niamh is a co-author of the new Peace Agreements Actor Dataset (PAA-X), in addition to being a co-creator of the PA-X Tracker, a new peace and transition process tracker from PeaceRep (https://pax.peaceagreements.org/tracker/). She holds an MS in Information Science from the University of Amsterdam, and an MA in Digital Media and Information Studies from the University of Glasgow
Tomas Vancisin is a research associate in Data Visualization at PeaceRep (School of Law), focusing on visualisation of transition trajectories, and the mediation space of peace and transition processes. His research interests include Visualization as part of Humanities Research, Visualization of Historical Cultural Collections, Provenance Visualization and Digital Humanities. He holds an MA(Hons) in Comparative Literature & Russian, MSc in Computing and Information Technology, and PhD in Computer Science, all from the University of St Andrews.The Edinburgh DataVis Meetup is an informal community event open to all, that has been bringing together practitioners, designers, academics and the just plain curious in this highly active field since 2018.
This is a joint event with Newcastle University, and a hybrid event.
Doors open at 1800; talks start at 1815. Non-alcoholic refreshments provided.Zoom link:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4305992291
Meeting ID: 430 599 2291
Passcode: tfpzX9RK