ICT4D
Database
Information
Communication Technologies for Development
Dr.
Philip Howard, Principal Investigator
Maria Garrido, Project Manager
We gratefully
acknowledge the University of Washington’s Royalty
Research Fund for financial support of this project, and John
Klockner, Senior Computer Specialist in the Department of Communication, for design
of the search engine.
**The search and data entry engine will
launch October 1, 2003**
The purpose of this project is to build a
web-based search interface for a collection of material about information
communication technologies used to solve social problems in developing
countries. The audience for this
service includes policy makers, in-country development practitioners,
entrepreneurs and academics eager to benefit from international experience in
nation building, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and other forms of humanitarian
assistance. The database includes a
wide range of material, from press releases to working papers, academic
reports, and other sources of grey literature.
This purpose of this project is to build an archive of print and
digital documents about the role of new media information communication
technologies (ICTs) in international development. While the information society is well constructed in the
developed world, it is being assembled at a slower pace in less developed
countries. Moreover, the story of how
technologies like the Internet, wireless communication, and relational
databases are being used for social development is told through a burgeoning
‘gray literature’ on the topic. There
have been a number of single case-studies that teach us about particular
technologies, particular country experiences, or particular economic, political
and cultural institutions. The next
step in development communication research about new media, however, is to make
cross-case studies that compare and contrast across multiple technologies and
country experiences. This new research
direction with a comparative method requires a systematic archive of country
and technology-specific experiences - a relational database that organizes
print and digital materials so as to facilitate comparative analysis.
A. Rationale
Aid agencies, charities, church groups and local non-governmental
agencies conduct much of the research about ICT and developing countries. This literature – often called ‘gray
literature’ – is necessary for an understanding about how the information
society is taking shape in the developed world. However, this will not be an archive about general technology
transfer, but about new media ICT. New
media ICT is the superstructure of fast, high-capacity communication tools
(hardware and software) that lets people transmit, filter and interact with
data. These communication technologies
are often defined by three attributes:
(1) communications media that
structurally exist over and above traditional media in a network of satellites,
relay stations and databases that coordinate the retrieval and delivery of
public and private content, (2) they operate at greater speeds with greater
amounts of content than traditional media, and (3) they collapse distinctions
between real and simulated social interaction and allow for the rapid
decomposition and recomposition of cultural content (Howard 2002).
There is a growing amount of research into development
communication and the role information communication technologies (ICTs) in
improving the quality of life around the world (Norris 2001). Evidence suggests that public health
services, environmental impact assessments, agricultural research, distance
education, and micro-credit loan services are significantly more effective when
ICTs are employed (Edejer 2000; Grant 2000; Jimba 2000). Aside from the specific goal of improving
the logistics of development work, researchers often harbor a hope that ICTs
will help developing countries ‘leapfrog’ over some of the difficult political,
cultural and economic problems that developed countries have had to wrestle
with. Whereas developed countries have
had to make significant infrastructure investments in wired telecommunications,
for example, developing countries may be able to avoid this investment by
building an infrastructure of wireless communication technologies (Butler 1999;
James 2001). But using western
technologies, often with politically loaded conditions currently imposed on
developing countries, has had complex cultural and economic implications
(Canclini 1996; Arunachalam 1999). And
beyond the obvious logistical benefits for observing elections, documenting
crimes against humanity, and providing disaster relief, these technologies are
often used by challenger groups to project their political grievances onto the
international stage (Cleaver 1998; Kalathil and Boas in press). Not only is there a significant digital
divide between OECD countries and the rest of the world, but within the
developing world many communities are entirely ‘off the grid’ (Persaud 2001;
Kowalczykowski 2002).
The other great hope in development communication is that the
small, indigenous development projects started within poor communities may
benefit most from ICTs. Examples
include the Indian company PicoPeta that builds computing devices at price
points accessible to the middle classes of developing countries
(http://www.picopeta.com), the Tarahaat Project that builds village to village
linkages and records the progress of land reform (www.tarahaat.com), or the
Global Forest Watch that allows indigenous communities to monitor sustainable
development and logging practicess (http://www.globalforestwatch.org). As technologies become less expensive and
easier to use, the organizational capacity of local development projects may
improve. It is particularly difficult,
however, to study the ‘national leapfrog’ hypothesis or the ‘local empowerment’
hypothesis without systematically collected data that allows for comparison
across countries and cultures. And only
by systematically archiving this research can we begin to distinguish between
the hype of new media, the failed development projects, and the real prospects
for improving development communication (Loo and Beng 1998; Madon 2000).
There is a significant body of literature about the impact of new
media ICT in wealthy, northern democracies (Howard, Jones et al. 2001; Howard
2002; Howard and Jones 2003). But the
current research on new media ICT and international development tends to be
either single country case studies, studies of particular technologies, or
cross-case comparisons that involve several countries selected for their
similarity in culture, geography, or stage in development (Coy, Moshavi et al.
1994; Mitra 1996; Wheeler 2000; Lal 2001; Mesch 2001; Franda 2002). Currently, scholars are wrestling with a
number of questions about the role of ICT in international development,
questions that require comparative analysis to answer meaningfully:
· What does the
so-called ‘digital divide’ mean in the context of international development and
the limited capacity of political, economic, and cultural institutions?
· How
transportable are these successful technology projects to other parts of the
world?
· Does the scale
of problems faced by Third World countries effectively marginalize any concerns
about information technology?
· Do low rates of
Internet penetration in the developing world prevent the use of the Internet in
outreach to mobilize the population at large?
· Which
Internet-related development strategies have been successful, if any? Is the
Internet in fact revolutionizing the workings of development policy?
· Since access to
Internet in the Third World countries is limited to elite groups, can the
Internet realistically improve access to the legal system, to health care, education,
participation in decision-making of the population?
· Is the Internet
better suited as an instrument used by the elite working for NGOs, and/or the
authorities, involved in development policies because they are the only ones
with access? Are new media development
tools then just another form of globalization and development from ‘outside’?
· What are the
advantages and disadvantages of technical assistance and the use of internet in
different stages of project implementation and development strategies?
The next step in this research agenda is to embrace more than a
handful of country case-studies, but this will only be possible with an
appropriate archive of experience from development projects that employ new
media ICT. More important, answers to
these questions may be different across the common categories of social
inequality such as gender, age and ethnicity (Mitter and Rowbotham 1995; Mitra
1997; Mesch 2001).
The Importance of Gray Literature.
Comparative research in development communication is difficult because
most of the sources about how people use information technologies are ‘gray
literature’ – published not by commercial publishers but self-published by
governments, academics, and businesses in both print and electronic form. Even though these kinds of sources are
considered gray literature, they can be very powerful resources in social
science research if collected in a systematic way so that data points can be
compared and trend lines found. Such
sources include reports (pre-prints, preliminary progress and advanced reports,
technical reports, statistical reports, memoranda, state-of-the art reports,
market research reports, non-profit project appraisals), theses, conference
proceedings, technical specifications and standards, non-commercial
translations, bibliographies, technical and commercial documentation, and
official documents not published commercially (primarily government or
intergovernmental agency research reports, funding requests or project
appraisals).
B. Objectives
This specific project will systematically archive bibliographic
references and wherever possible, copies of digital and print
publications. The project has three
specific goals:
1. To create a
repository of research that can serve as a knowledge base for the PI’s
research, and be accessible to the larger scholarly community.
2. To stimulate the
production of new academic research that is sited within and contributes to the
practice of sound development policy.
3. To provide
decision-makers with access to the resources of scholarly analysis and
empirical data and to ground the leading edge of development policymaking in a
critical understanding of current results.
This project is the data collection phase of a larger research
agenda that has three more broad goals:
a) to critically
assess the role of new media in local, national, regional and global
development work;
b) to draw lessons
from specific development projects in which new media ICTs have played a key
role;
c) to apply the
comparative method and critical theories of development to generalize from
specific development projects and strategize about how these lessons can be
transported to other parts of the world.
C. Procedure
The archive contains information on books, journal articles, papers,
and newspaper clippings relating to the study of the role of information and
communication technologies in international development. The entries in the archive are bibliographic
references, but wherever possible the archive also holds digital copies of the
referenced material. Currently, the
archive has about 200 casually collected entries, gathered over the course of
preliminary research by the PI. Many of
the items are from easily accessible books, journals, magazines and
newspapers. However, financial support
is needed to systematically expand this archive.
Archive Structure & Function.
Along with the traditional bibliographic information about a source,
each entry has been coded for country, region, type of ICT, and the sector of
development. This special coding system
was developed to permit complex Boolean searches of the archive so as to
produce subsets of items relating to specific issues (See Table). With subject specific codes, researchers may
use either the PI’s coding system, keywords, author names, titles or any of the
other fields of Endnote output.
Table 1: Custom Fields for the ICT-ID Archive
|
Custom Fields |
Current Entries |
|
Country |
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola,
Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil,
Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burma, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African
Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire,
Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El
Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Gambia, Germany, East, Germany, West,
Gaza, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary,
India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan,
Kampuchea, Kenya, Korea, North, Korea, South , Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya,
Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique,
Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi
Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri
Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo,
Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, USSR, Venezuela,
Vietnam, North Yemen, South Yemen, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zambia,
Zimbabwe. |
|
Region / Identity Groupings |
North/South; High, Middle, Low Income; OECD,
non-OECD; Developed, Developing, Transitional, Oil-Producing; Donor,
Non-Donor; Indebted, Highly Indebted; Security Council, Arab League;
Non-aligned; Service (Tertiary Sector Dominant); Industrial
(Secondary Sector Dominant); Agricultural (Primary Sector Dominant);
North-America/Europe/Japan, North-Africa/Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa,
Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Russia & Former Republics; Asian
Tigers, African Tigers; G8, G20, G77; Post-colonial, post-communist, former
Warsaw-Pact, the ‘stans’ |
|
Funding Organization |
Government Agency / For Profit / Non-Profit
Charity; Indigenous |
|
ICT |
Internet, wireless, mobile phone, chat, data
mining, laptops, desktops, simputer, intranet, GPS, satellite |
|
Development Sectors |
Culture, Politics, Environment, Gender,
Education, Agriculture, Human Rights & Justice, Public Health, Rural,
Urban |
|
Note:
To be consistent with commonly used categories, these were adapted
from two widely used databases on social development: the World Bank’s Socio-Economic Time
Series Retrieval |
|
This archive will seek two kinds of materials: (1) digital materials that can be found
online but are not stored together, coded and accessible in a database; (2) gray
literature print materials which cannot be found online or through local
research libraries but are published by non-profits, specialized government
agencies, and faith based organizations, and filed with the Library of
Congress, USAID, British Library or British Library of Political and Economic
Science.
Ultimately this archive will be available online to the wider
community of scholars interested in ICT and international development. However, the coding system was developed
specifically for the PI’s research purposes, and it will form a crucial
foundation for his comparative work.
Thus, the searchable database will be made available as an online aid
for other scholars and policy-makers, but this grant will not establish a
library that loans out material.
This archive draws from research in a number of disciplines, and
thus will be a valuable interdisciplinary research resource for anthropology,
history, demography, development studies, international relations, peace &
conflict studies, urban studies, area studies, and the social, economic,
political and communication sciences.
D. Time Schedule
Summer Quarter 2003 - Print Material Collection. Early in the summer one month devoted to
information and archival work in Seattle, then at the end of summer a week at
the Library of Congress and another week at the British Library.
Fall 2003 - Digital Material Collection. Supervise graduate research assistants as they code and archive materials
collected over the summer and begin their own searches of digital materials.
Winter 2004 - Mounting Database Online. Continue supervision of collection and coding materials, design
the web-based user-interface for making the database available and searchable
online.
E. Literature Citations
Arunachalam, S. (1999). Information
Technology: What Does It Mean for Scientists and Scholars in the Developing
World? How Technology Enhances Existing Inequalities. Bulletin of the American
Society for Information Science. 25: 21-24.
Butler, D. (1999). Internet May Help
Bridge the Gap. Nature. 397: 10.
Canclini, N. G. (1996). Unequal Partners:
Threat of New Communications Media to Non-Western Culture. UNESCO Courier.
September: 29-31.
Cleaver, H. (1998). "The Zapatista
Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric."
Journal of International Affairs 51(2): 621-640.
Coy, P., S. Moshavi, et al. (1994).
There's More Than One Way to Play Leapfrog: Third-World Countries Are Adopting
Key Technologies. Business Week. 3399: 162-163.
Edejer, T. T.-T. (2000).
"Disseminating Health Information in Developing Countries: The Role of the
Internet." British Medical Journal 321(7264): 797-800.
Franda, M. F. (2002). China and India
Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World's Largest Nations,
Rowman & Littlefield.
Grant, E. S. (2000). "Towards an
Internet-Based Education Model for Caribbean Countries." Journal of
Educational Media 25(1): 21-30.
Howard, P. N. (2002). "Network
Ethnography and the Hypermedia Organization:
New Media, New Organizations, New Methods." New Media & Society
4(4): 550-574.
Howard, P. N. and S. Jones, Eds. (2003).
Society Online: The Internet in
Context. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.
Howard, P. N., S. Jones, et al. (2001).
"Days and Nights on the Internet:
The Impact of a Diffusing Technology." American Behavioral
Scientist 45: 382-404.
James, J. (2001). " Bridging the
Digital Divide with Low-Cost Information Technologies." Journal of
Information Science 27(4).
Jimba, S. W. (2000). "The Influence
of Information Technology Access on Agricultural Research in Nigeria."
Internet Research 10(1): 63.
Kalathil, S. and T. Boas (in press). Open
Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule,
Carnegie.
Kowalczykowski, M. (2002).
"Disconnected Continent." Harvard International Review 24(2): 40-43.
Lal, K. (2001). "Institutional
Environment and the Development of Information and Communication Technology in
India." The Information Society 17(2).
Loo, E. and Y. S. Beng (1998).
"‘Cyber-Colonialism in Asia: More Imagined Than Real?’." Media Asia
3(25): 130-137.
Madon, S. (2000). "The Internet and
Socio-Economic Development: Exploring the Interaction." Information
Technology & People 13(2): 85.
Mesch, G. S. (2001). "Social
Relationships and Internet Use among Adolescents in Israel." Social
Science Quarterly 82(329-340).
Mitra, A. (1996). "Nations and the
Internet: The Case of a National Newsgroup." Convergence: The Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies 2(1): 44-75.
Mitra, A. (1997). "Diasporic Web
Sites: Ingroup and Outgroup Discourse." Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 14: 158-181.
Mitter, S. and S. Rowbotham (1995). Women
Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World.
London, Routledge.
Norris, P. (2001). Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and
the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY, USA, Cambridge University
Press.
Persaud, A. (2001). The Knowledge Gap.
Foreign Affairs. 80: 107-117.
Wheeler, D. (2000). "New Media,
Globalization and Kuwaiti National Identity." The Middle East Journal
54(3): 432-444.