The Insurgency Tactics of Amateur Conflict Mapmakers

Amateur conflict mapmakers use and cross-reference data from social media that is verified, timestamped, and geotagged to form the basis for their war maps. Compared with the official conflict maps of news organizations, their work often looks more raw and unprocessed. This absence of refinement might originate in a lack of training and the use of unsophisticated tools. However, the visual strategies developed by the nonspecialists follow a visual logic that serves the purpose of presenting evidence rather than the representation of a site. The work of amateur conflict mapmakers are ‘visibilisations’, rather than visualisations: their maps highlight the process of mapping rather than the act of mapmaking.

The paper will specifically look at the work of amateur conflict mapmaker Thomas van Linge whose regularly updated map of the Syrian Civil War, made as an Amsterdam teenager from his bedroom, is considered highly accurate. Tightly cropped around the country, the title positioned in the top center and the legend at the bottom, both set in a serif typeface, light blue for water and bright colours for the different parties that control the country, Van Linge’s “the situation in Syria” map has the appearance of traditional cartography. What is considerably different from conventional maps is how it is produced and embedded it in several online debates. His map is not created with a specialist tool but with Microsoft Paint, a pixel graphics editor with limited capabilities that is part of the Windows operating system. The use of this software leaves traces of earlier versions of the map. This digital residue of previous editions is a visual cue of an ongoing negotiation between the map, the conditions it depicts, the cartographic language in which it is done, and the technology used to produce it.