MARGAO: Intolerance Tracker is a visual story-telling and crowd-mapping platform that seeks to report and aggregate incidents of intolerance in South Asia. It arose in response to the growing number of such incidents in the region in recent years, whether it is religious intolerance towards minorities, gender-based, caste-based discrimination, suppression of dissent and protest, or race and ethnicity-based exclusions that are now commonplace.
This platform attempts to be a space that will consolidate information and understand trends that often get lost due to the fragmented nature of the 24-hour news cycle.
Part of the team that created this platform is a Goan, Siddharth Peter de Souza. It is now five months that he moved to Cambridge University, UK to pursue a Masters in Law (LLM). Siddharth grew up in Dona Paula and studied in Sharada Mandir until Class 8 before moving to Delhi to complete his schooling and University.
“This is a new platform and the novelty is that the stories and content is sourced from the community,” said Siddharth while beginning to talk about the platform.
Intolerance Tracker is a collaborative effort of Cambridge South Asia Watch a student group of those deeply engaged in the region, Justice Adda a legal design platform and Timescape a visual storytelling and crowd mapping platform. Siddharth is one of the five co-founders and the team also consists of eight curators and three advisors.
“We decided to use a map because we felt that it would be a compelling medium through which we could compare stories across time and space and present it in a visually appealing manner,” added Siddharth.
When asked why they chose South Asia, Siddharth explained that they chose to cover South Asia because as residents and citizens it was a context they understood the best and also because they felt both alarmed and anxious about the manner in which such incidents were taking place at such a frequent interval.
The project currently covers India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh at this stage.
Intolerance Tracker attempts to use the power of the community to grow organically and report stories in the region. A reader can upload a story by using a Google, Facebook or a Timescape account and complete a form which has details of the information required to file the story. To upload a story, users are required to click on the ‘Map your Story’ button, and fill out the details of the event, including a title, brief description, and details about the location and date. The user is then prompted to tag the ‘Persons Targeted’ as well as tag the ‘Perpetrators’. The user will then be asked to use tags which best describe the incident. This will allow the team to study and distinguish stories based on their unique characteristics.
In order to ensure reliability of stories, a reference link must be provided. This will ensure that all stories are verified by existing news sources.
When asked to explain its screening process and the factors they take into consideration while qualifying what can be termed as act of discrimination, Siddharth emphasised that the team carries out a moderating and editing exercise every couple of days to ensure the stories are of the highest credibility.
“As this is a crowd mapping platform, the entries are populated organically, and anyone can fill in a story. However, we do have the right to moderate and curtail stories that are seen as abusive and against the spirit of the website,” added Siddharth.
Incidents of intolerance are categorised on the basis of the persons targetted as well as who the perpetrators are. These are divided under two broad categories and further subsets and one can choose as many as applicable. The first being about ‘Persons targetted’ which cover Religion, Activism and Ideology, Caste, Ethnicity/race, Gender, Class and Sexual Orientation. The second being about Perpetrators which covers Government body/actor, Police, Private Company, Political group, Social group, Religious group and Individuals.
Responding to queries if the platform will take into account the versions of the perpetrators as to ensure fairness, Siddharth pointed out that if there is an update to a story already reported then, they can update an existing story to reflect the change in circumstances. “Alternatively if it is a material change and means an altogether new event, then that new event will also be reported,” said Siddharth.
On their long-term goals and what they hope to achieve, the team believes that “the ‘Intolerance Tracker’ will serve a monitoring function by reporting incidents in a regular manner, an advocacy function by allowing the public to hold entities accountable and a research function by using the data to understand the complexities of these regions in South Asia.”
One of the complexities that they have to deal with is the fact that on account of each country having different constitutions, a scenario where they could be a pattern or similar cases emerging from one specific country that might not be so similar to cases emerging from another country can emerge. When asked to clarify about this and how they would thus collate and present incidents of intolerance for each country, the team explained that the mapping tool makes it possible for them analyse trends that emerge from countries and reflect on the kinds of intolerance in specific regions based on the context of that region.
“The mapping tool does allow you to analyse information on the basis of the category of the incident but also and importantly on the basis of time and space,” added Siddharth.
