Last week, my colleague, Jen Ziemke, co-hosted the first international conference on crisis mapping at John Carroll University.  If you want to see how technology is changing the way academics work and what they study, check out the website which catalogs the activities of the conference.

The emerging field of crisis mapping uses technology to map and coordinate responses to humanitarian disasters, whether natural or man-made.  There is a little too much jargon on the website for my taste—it is an emerging academic discipline after all—but the list of participants suggests that there is something important going on here.

The conference was sponsored in part by the Open Society Institute (OSI), Humanity United (HU), and the US Institute of Peace (USIP).