The Borderwork(s) Focus Class on Refugee Camp Security recently carried out a balloon-mapping exercise to teach students about the difficulty that humanitarian agencies and governments face when trying to track refugee flows. As Lab faculty Erika Weinthal and Claudia Koonz explain:

Having a more accurate picture of refugee flows helps organizations and governments plan operations during times of heightened uncertainty so as to better target supplies to areas in greatest need. Rather than only relying upon refugees registering at camps, humanitarian agencies increasingly rely upon other sources of information to track refugee flows, including aerial images.

We thus sent up a low-tech balloon-kite above East Campus to track student movements during the middle of the day. The balloon had a camera attached that could automatically take pictures. After the balloon came down and the camera retrieved, students began to work with publicly available software (Mapknitter) to stitch together a map of human movement.

Here are some more photos from the exercise, courtesy of class member Hu Cha.

The aerial images knitted together: