Counting rules
- Unique records: counts use Record ID. Thirty-one duplicate source items were skipped during the canonical WXR reconstruction.
- Incidents and people: a record count is not a victim count. One record may describe one or many incidents and one or many people.
- Multiple classifications: one record can have several violations, methods and outcomes. Category totals therefore overlap and should not be added together.
- Explicit people totals: killed and injured figures use the available numeric fields for women, children and other civilians. The historical archive is sparsely populated, so these figures are minimum explicit totals within the current dataset, not comprehensive casualty totals.
- Displacement snapshots: IDP, refugee, household and home figures can describe overlapping groups or different units. The dashboard does not create a cumulative total by summing them.
- Post-coup period: events dated on or after 1 February 2021.
Violation, method and outcome
Violation category describes the right affected or abuse documented. Method or weapon describes how the incident occurred. Victim or community outcome describes what happened as a result. These fields are deliberately separate.
For example, one airstrike record may also be classified under killings and disappearances, forced relocation and displacement, attacks on education and violations of property rights. Its methods may include aircraft and explosive weapons, while its outcomes may include people killed, people injured, homes damaged and households displaced.
Death-related language
The review logic flags reports containing language such as killed, killings, died, death, dead, passed away, succumbed to injuries, shot dead, burned to death, beaten to death, died in custody, body found, body recovered, executed, murdered, or missing and later found dead.
Common negations such as “nearly died,” “feared he had died,” or “no one was killed” are excluded where possible. Keyword detection creates a discovery flag only. Public classifications in this release are covered by HURFOM’s staff-review attestation; explicit people totals remain separate from language classifications.
Property-rights scope
Property-rights review includes land confiscation and forced transfer, seizure or occupation of homes and farms, village burning, destruction of houses, shops and markets, damage to farms or fishing equipment, livestock loss, looting, damage to religious buildings, schools or clinics, denial of access, prevention of return, forced abandonment and compensation status.
Outcomes can include partially damaged, fully destroyed, burned, looted, confiscated, occupied, abandoned, inaccessible, returned, compensation received and compensation not received. The present historical schema does not yet contain reviewed numeric fields for every one of these outcomes.
Forced conscription figures
Conscription-related reports are shown separately for Mon State, Karen State and Tanintharyi Region. The current archive does not contain a reviewed “people affected” field. Some source texts describe recruited people, others detained people, people released after payment, escapees, returnees at risk or cumulative estimates that may overlap. For accuracy, the dashboard publishes exact matched record counts and leaves aggregate people totals blank until record-by-record review is complete.
Darkness Archive counting
The Darkness Archive uses the official HURFOM X data export from 1 February 2021. Every source post is retained. Replies to an available HURFOM root post are grouped as one archive entry, while retweets remain separate source-evidence entries. Retweets, publications, advocacy posts and situation summaries are not counted as case candidates.
Category, location and explicit-number fields were initially produced with reproducible rules and are now covered by HURFOM’s organizational staff-review, disclosure-redaction and generalized-location attestation. Evidence roles remain unchanged. Source-level figures are never added automatically to canonical incident or victim totals.
Public location and map policy
Coordinates are approximate or generalized reference points approved for public use. Exact locations for survivors, shelters, safe houses, displaced communities and HURFOM field networks must never be published. Public map points must not be used for navigation or operational decisions. Geographic cells and geographic/profile combinations below five records are automatically withheld.
The Overview, detailed incident map and Darkness Archive use the same HURFOM symbol and colour vocabulary. Marker density shows documented evidence and reporting access, not total prevalence. Documentation coverage, zero, no-data, suppressed and not-applicable states remain distinct. Population-normalized values are shown only when coverage, denominator and comparability gates are all satisfied.