In Acholi, the language spoken in
Northern Uganda where Kony’s LRA was recently driven out, as well as the new
nation of South Sudan, they have no word for map. Why then do most
conflict prevention ICT applications organize information around maps?
There are over 40 languages spoken in the region, and none have a word for map.
The disconnect is deeper than language. It extends to the way in
which cultures conceptualize information—what is deemed worth capturing and how
it should be organized. For example, most applications organize
information around a linear concept of time. Some cultures have a
circular concept of time, or even a combination of the linear and
circular. If you find this hard to imagine, then you have begun to
understand how someone from those perspectives must adapt to share information
in the current format. Beyond changing the language users see on the
interface, ICTs have not adapted to other cultural concepts of knowledge
management. This has profound implications for whether or not local users
have access to the information or if they feel it’s relevant for their own
policy implementation.
A recent War of Ideas post profiled
the conflict early warning initiative called Hatebase which collects hate
speech via a Wikipedia-like interface and correlates the entries with reports
of violence. The assumption being that the Rwandan genocide was
preventable and monitoring local language patterns could play a part.
However, the feeling of being caught by surprise and failing to prevent the
conflict are the feelings of an outsider, not those of a Rwandan. So it
must be asked, who is this tool for? Individuals in conflict-affected
areas are perpetually simplified into victims waiting to be given a
voice. Rwandans had the information, it just wasn’t in written form
accessible to the West. The oral nature of information in other cultures
has so far been discounted in ICT design; only when information takes written
form is it cemented as fact, as actionable, as ready for analysis.
Among the nearly 6800 languages,
only around 100 developed a literature, the rest remain oral to some
extent. Orality in a culture does not imply underdevelopment or
opposition to literacy, simply a preference for that mode of expression.
There is enormous potential to re-imagine the visual interface, to respond to
cognitive cues and communication norms from the cultures crowding into the
digital space... Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, China. This is an unexplored
avenue for ICT design.
How would Hatebase contend with the
Acholi word gwok? It can be pronounced six different ways in order
to mean either: dog, shoulder, incapable, misfortune, do not, or protect.
You have to hear it. Information is something you hear, collect and
pass on. Gam means both to receive answers from someone (and pass
them on) and collect people in a taxi and drive them off. So it is with
information here. It moves. It defies conventional categories. Hatebase may have research value, but without
integrating more culture-specific concepts of how to collect and organize
communication data, it will never gain a predictive capacity or relevance
within conflict areas.
