A Qualitative Difference: Integrating Qualitative Data into Humanitarian Response Operations

Abstract

Recent developments in qualitative data analytics may generate helpful insights for humanitarian response. At the same time, humanitarian coordination efforts are embracing data sharing platforms to ease data flows. Combined, these two innovations could simultaneously offer operational insights across multiple humanitarian organizations. We pursue this potential through the QualMiner project, an18-month collaboration of the UN-led response to the Venezuelan forced migration crisis in Ecuador. In our efforts to integrate qualitative data, we developed applications with implications for local operations as well as platform features and analyzed data entry processes and information product designs. Our analysis finds the established quantitative system serves as an installed base enacting agency and generating three effects, namely framing, artifacts, and informing. We also find collaborative innovation with non-profit users results in direct and indirect factors shaping the data sharing platform's boundaries. Finally, our analysis provides a critical, yet depolarized [1], assessment of advanced analytics in the humanitarian context. These findings have implications for platform boundary theories and critical data studies in the humanitarian domain, as well as humanitarian information management practice.