Brian Tomaszewski writes about his project to train Syrian refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to map the camp. “They have intimate knowledge of the camp’s layout, understand where important resources are located and benefit most from camp maps.” Over 18 months his team trained 10 refugees basic concepts, field collection techniques, and how to map with mobile phones. “Within a relatively short amount of time, they were able to create professional maps that now serve camp management staff and refugees themselves.” His team is now working on obtaining GIS certifications for some of them. [Leventhal]

See also “GIS for Refugees, by Refugees,” an article Tomaszewski wrote for the Summer 2017 issue of ArcNews.

The rise of these next-generation mapmakers comes as many news organizations around the world are reducing their commitment to foreign coverage. And reporting from conflict zones remains as dangerous as ever. According to Reporters Without Borders, 50 journalists and 142 citizen journalists have been killed in Syria since 2011. The lack of on-the-ground coverage by journalists leaves an information gap that is being filled by these digitally savvy mapmakers.

[WMS]

The New York Times maps the impact of Russian airstrikes on the Syrian civil war. Using several maps to indicate the impact on each faction—government, rebels, ISIS and Kurds—strikes me as quite effective, as is the use of colour-highlighted text in the headings, rather than a legend, to indicate each faction.

The Syria Conflict Mapping Project (screenshot above), a project of the Carter Center, has been documenting events in the Syrian civil war since 2012 using open source information. “Using these publicly available resources, as well as regular consultations with stakeholders in the country, the Center has documented and mapped over 40,000 conflict events in Syria (including clashes, aerial bombardments, artillery shelling, etc.), the changing relations between thousands of armed groups, movements of internally displaced people, and humanitarian conditions.” [via]