Projects
Digital Setu: Bhimdhunga Digital Divide Storymap
Interactive multimedia documentation of digital infrastructure and access in rural Nepal
Overview
An interactive storymap documenting digital infrastructure, access patterns, and community perspectives in Bhimdhunga, Nagarjun. It sets official coverage statistics against household-level stories (interviews, photographs, and spatial data) to show the gap between what the numbers say about connectivity and how residents actually experience it.
Built in a team during the All In Solutions fellowship, 2025.
Approach
- Mixed methods: household interviews plus infrastructure mapping
- Community-centered: residents’ own accounts drive the narrative, not extracted data points
- Visual-first: minimal text, multimedia story points on an interactive map
- Offline-first: plain HTML/CSS/JS with no external dependencies, so it can be demonstrated and shared in the low-connectivity areas it documents
What the Stories Show
Coverage maps make Bhimdhunga look reasonably connected. The interviews complicate that: connectivity is intermittent, affordability and digital literacy constrain access more than infrastructure does, most internet use is mobile-only, and access runs through community and household networks more than individual subscriptions.
Reflection
What worked: community participation gave the narrative its authority; the visual approach crossed language barriers; offline-first design meant residents could actually view and share the thing.
What I’d change: more quantitative visualization to pair with the stories, a temporal dimension (how access has changed), and a way for residents to update it without me.