About HateMap

HateMap collects information on hate incidents from online news media sources. A hate incident includes harassment, intimidation, vandalism, speech, robbery, or any form of violence that appears to be motivated by an aspect of the victim's identity. The site presents a publicly available, near real-time aggregation of media narratives of specific events, categorized by geography, targeted victim group, and the nature and severity of the act. Our aim with the project is to bring attention to this important problem and supplement other data sources in this domain such as law enforcement and non-profit groups.

The data presented here has many limitations. Hate incidents hinge on intent, which can be difficult to measure under any circumstances. Often when an event occurs, we don't have access to key facts, much less knowledge of the intent of those involved. At times, incidents that at first seem to be motivated by bias later turn out not to be, or vice versa. For this project, we tend to err on the side of including events that appear to involve some form of hate-related motivation, even when no certain determination can be made. We always include links to the data source, so that site visitors can access the available information directly and form their own interpretation.

HateMap was developed by Yulin Hswen (Harvard/Boston Children's Hospital) and Clark Freifeld, with advisor Jack McDevitt (College of Humanities and Social Science at Northeastern). Special thanks to Katelynn O'Brien for frontend design and development.

Contact us at info@hatemap.org.

Other resources on hate crimes: