HRDAG's Michelle Dukich explains the meticulous work of record linkage that allows us to gain insight from disparate, incomplete datasets.
Record linkage is the careful work of determining when multiple records refer to the same person.
In Sri Lanka, that means working across Tamil, Sinhalese, and English spellings; partial names; uncertain dates; and multiple locations.
HRDAG and the International Truth and Justice Project are working to bring those fragments together and start to tell the real story of what happened in Sri Lanka.
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Statisticians love to have perfectly-designed, random samples to study. But reality is messy and many datasets have some inherent bias.
That doesn't mean we can't use them. It means we need to acknowledge and account for bias. hrdag.substack.com/p/yes-your-d...
Read how Michelle dedicated 8 years to bringing insight and accountability to the Sri Lankan civil war and the newly published database of 10,000 names of lives lost.
hrdag.substack.com/p/the-names-...
Asian-American residents in Siskiyou County alleged years of discriminatory policing. HRDAG helped the ACLU of Northern California process and analyze ~6,500 body-worn camera videos to support accountability efforts and ongoing monitoring. hrdag.org/2026/05/01/s...
There is no single authoritative list of Sri Lanka’s dead and disappeared.
There are fragments: survivor testimony, NGO reports, memorial lists, legal filings, handwritten records, and more.
Interesting read: this piece from @codastory.com captures something important about the current moment: there is a struggle not only over truth, but over the conditions that make truth legible, findable, and believable at all. www.codastory.com/rewriting-hi...