Overall, this project does not always use the best practices in digital humanities. Documentation seems to be the weakest link. While it does seem to be improving, the document on methodology, for example, is “the first of its kind.” Before this document was created in 2021, there was no dedicated document on explaining the methodology, which is an important part of the best practices in digital humanities. There’s no one page document explaining the planning of the project. There’s also not really any document or place that acknowledges who directly is working on the project or apart of the collaboration. Which is especially problematic since there was a court case over possible copy right infringement committed by Campaign Zero and that their website allegedly copied Samuel Singyagwe’s original website. While Mapping Police Violence acknowledges researchers as their audience, it does not directly state that the primary audience is researchers or that the project is mainly for researchers, which goes against best practices since it should be clearly stated.
The project does acknowledge the limits of the data it uses. The 2025 year-end report directly acknowledges the issue of underreporting as there is “the closure of newsrooms across the country,” which directly affects Mapping Police Violence as news articles are their primary data source. But the project doesn’t seem to dive deeply into the other problems that may stem from using data about police violence. It doesn’t address any type of privacy concerns that could exist because the database is free for everyone to use and contains information about the victim of police violence like their name, age, gender, and sometimes an image of them.
But it does seem to be very open about how the data is collected and used. For the data and methodology, there seems to be more of an effort to showcase and highlight the processes behind it. There’s a data and methodology section on the website dedicated to explaining and showing the different steps taken through the data collection process. But this data and methodology section doesn’t include information on the data visualizations on the website. The absence of this information may have to do with the court case since it was over the visualizations used. But there is no mention of the tools that were used to create the visualizations or how data is visualized which goes against best practices.
The project does mostly follow best practices when it comes to tools. Most of the tools it uses like Google Alerts and Airtable are free and open, which goes along with best practices. But Meltwater isn’t a free tool to use at all and that goes against best practices.
The project is also quite explicit that the main goal of the project is to take all instances of police violence in the country, which is apart of best practices. But since the history of the project and who is behind the project isn’t exactly clear on the website, it’s hard for someone to know that the goal of the project has changed since it was first started in 2013.
