Mapping the Syrian Conflict with Social Media

Monitoring the conflict in Syria currently requires spending hundreds of hours manually processing thousands of Facebook and YouTube pages in addition to information published by traditional media and non-profit organizations. We worked with Eliot Higgins (aka Brown Moses) to identify these sources, and using the CrisisNET platform we combined them into a single stream of continuously updated, real-time data.

CrisisNET is currently in private alpha until June, but you can sign up for our mailing list and we'll let you know when it's public.

Note: There is a separate project that was built with the Ushahidi mapping platform called Syria Tracker that uses crowdsourced reporting to monitor the conflict. Check it out.

Violence Map

The map below shows the number of reports of violence across Syria using first-person accounts from Facebook and YouTube. Click on a map region to see a recent video from militant groups operating in that area.

Raw Data

Below are 50 recent documents from CrisisNET related to Syria. We automatically augment data as it comes into our platform so it's categorized, geolocated and translated into English.

Publish Time	Tags	Content	Translation	Link	Language	Image	Video

Code Examples

Getting data from CrisisNET couldn't be easier. Below is a simple example in JavaScript showing how to retrieve the 100 most recent incidents about Syria. We're currently in private alpha until June, but you can sign up for our mailing list and we'll let you know when it's public.

$.ajax({
  url: 'http://api.crisis.net/item?placeName=syria&limit=100',
  dataType: "json",
  beforeSend: function(xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Bearer YOUR API KEY');
  },
  success: function (data) {
    console.log(data);
  }
});