New Delhi: Digital Stories Around Indian Women’s Rights

From Dec. 7-8, 2013, activists, journalists, researchers, and coders met up at 91springboard in New Delhi to look at data about women’s rights in India, and find ways to create apps and multimedia stories that talked about women’s experiences in ways they hadn’t been talked about before.

Our five teams looked at diverse data. Below, what they worked on.

The homepage of their project: [AudioGroup]

One group picked up audio data from the rural mobile social network company, Gram Vaani — in which women from outlying towns and villages recorded audio clips about their experiences with early marriage (before the age of 18). They created a digital magazine-style scrolling story that incorporated these multilingual clips.

[DalitGroup]

Another group focused on how to use documentary film footage to explore the rights of Dalit — untouchable — women, whose legal rights are often disregarded and whose rates of assault and rape are higher than the national average. Because crimes against Dalit women are often not recorded, their voices rarely make it into the national dialogue about violence against women.

[WikiGroup]

Group Three looked at collaborative media, and in particular how stories about violence against women and about women activists get represented in online sources like Wikipedia. The group visualized landmark cases related to women’s rights, and worked on correcting and creating articles. For example, they worked on the article related to the recent Muzaffarnagar religious riots in northern India, adding information about crimes against women (this information had been missing before).

[TwitterGroup]

A Twitter-focused group built a real-time Twitter tracker to find and track misogynistic language in Tweets. They crowd-sourced a list of terms that were derogatory to women, built a tool to find those words, and then built a visualization interface that reflected real-time the amount of harassment against women that existed on social media. They also built an auto-reply bot that would automatically reply to misogynistic Tweets, flagging them to the user and asking for politer language.

[Whypoll Group]

Finally, one group used crowd-sourced women’s safety reports from the Whypoll Foundation (accounts of self-reported street harassment, collected and categorized on Ushahidi) and created two videos to document the dramatic experience of daily harassment that Indian women face. They also created an app that syncs with the Whypoll/SafeCity map, to ease the process of reporting street violence and harassment.

Read our event blog on the site. You can read about the groups, the projects, our media partners and our sponsors. The event was co-organized by Hacks/Hackers New Delhi and  Breakthrough, a nonprofit that uses media and technology to spread messages about violence against women. Videos of the final presentations are here, and you can meet the groups and walk around our event space in this great multimedia project by Raj Zaveri of Firefly Multimedia.