Author: pablo rey
Date: 2016-09-29 00:23 +200
To: List of the shared space for distributed research occupyresearch, occupyresearch-data@googlegroups.com
Subject: [Occupyresearch] 5 years later… time to officially bury OccupyResearchh

Dear occupy researchers,

The 5th anniversary of OWS is gone, and soon will be 5 years since the first OccupyResearch conference call (Oct. 29th, 2011). How about solemnly closing this project? On Oct 10th 2016 the domain is expiring. Let’s bury it.

For the past 4 years occupyresearch.net website hasn’t been updated. Two or three years ago the server expired and we had to restore the backup in a new place. Images and important files were lost, but thanks to the waybackmachine at archive.org we could rescue them. Recently we restored the original WordPress theme, repaired broken videos and the re-uploaded the wiki pages that were under password at occupyresearch.wikispaces.com

You can now browse all the original content at occupyresearch.net, but in a few days we’ll be transforming the dynamic website to a static one (thanks wget!) and archive it in the website cemetery at cementerio.montera34.com/occupyresearch.net (thanks to Montera34 cemetery!). A nice way to continue having access to files and forget about maintenance and paying the domain. Clones are welcome.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Do you want to throw some last words in the funeral? ideas? answer to this email and/or post them in the blog for posterity. If you don’t know how to access the blog, ask me!

Occupyresearch is dead! Occupy is dead!

Long live the 99 percent!

best,
Chris, Pablo and Sasha

Data sets

One major focus was the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey (ORGS), which aimed to gather information about the demographics of Occupiers as well as about various forms of civic and political participation in the Occupy movement. The survey was designed through a transparent and collaborative process that included Occupiers and researchers from across the globe.

The survey was conducted by the Occupy Research Network (http://occupyresearch.net), which includes academics, activists, students, community researchers, and others, with support from DataCenter (http://www.datacenter.org). A list of people involved in the ORGS survey is available at http://occupyresearch.wikispaces.com/surveys#People.

To explore questions about issues of interest to the movement, hackathon participants worked with publicly available data sets as well as social media data gathered by scraping information from sites like Twitter (State and Space), online news sources, and media sharing platforms like Youtube (Occupy Video as Data: Visualizing Temporal Narratives).

Hacked!

Faceted Browsing
Occupy Research has made the ORGS survey data available in many formats for analysis and remixing. In order to make the data accessible to more people who might be interested in exploring the survey’s findings, one group created a faceted navigation interface.

http://orgs-facet.tirl.org/exhibit.html

Text Mural
This mural draws from survey respondents’ answers to the question “If you participate in the Occupy movement, what TOP THREE concerns motivate you TO PARTICIPATE?” — the larger the word, the more it was used in people’s survey responses.  This is a collaboration between Nadia Afghani and Gilad Lotan.

State and Space

Also blending text and imagery, this project uses the web service Topsy and a Ruby script to search for tweets that document police misconduct or benevolence, can be traced back to a specific officer, and are related to Occupy events. After cleaning the tweets of web noise, e.g. http://, the project visualizes the prominence of particular keywords associated with police misconduct. As a balancing counterpoint, the project team is also searching for keywords associated with positive instances of police behavior.

Visions of Occupy
This project seeks to creatively juxtapose the beliefs we have which inspire us to occupy, and visual traces of the physical occupations themselves.

Using data collected this winter by the Occupy Research General Survey (administered by OccupyResearch), we take the answer to question 42—”In just a few words, what are you trying to achieve with your participation in the Occupy movement”—and pair it with a Flickr photo tagged with the camp name that the same respondent mentions. This means that while the photo displayed and quote may be completely unrelated (both in source and in specific content), viewers are presented with locational context and imagery.

Displaying ORGS survey results by State (by quantile)
Map by Don Blair and Chris Schweidler, using GeoCommons.

Exploring the Civic Anatomy of Occupy
According to the  Occupy Research General Survey (ORGS), OWS sympathizers and participants are among the most civically engaged individuals of the U.S. population, they possess an active voting record, and tend to be involved in a wide range of organizations and civic actions.  The ORGS allows us to explore some of the characteristics of the diverse “civic cultures” of online sympathizers who have brought broad support to OWS in the U.S.

Visualizing “Phrase Nets” using Many Eyes
Also using Many Eyes, this is a visualization of answers to the question “What is your top reason for participating in the Occupy Movemment” in which the most commonly occuring terms appear larger.

Overall the second #OccupyData hackathon was a success, with more participants than the first round, many creative explorations and demos of new data visualization possibilities, and a strong desire by participants to continue developing shared, distributed, free and open approaches to social movement based research.

Current version: http://orgs-facet.tirl.org

About
This is two different interfaces for faceted browsing of the results of the Occupy Research General Demographics and Participation Survey done at the Cambridge location of the Occupy Data 2 Hackathon. Thanks to Charlie DeTar for cleaning up the dataset.

The “simple” version:

 

The Exhibit version:

 Code for both is on GitHub.

OWS Tech Ops has been working to create the news aggregator at Newswire.Occupy.Net and the wiki at Occupy.net (http://wiki.occupy.net).

Occupiers are adding content to the wiki and a set of folks have been organizing it, adding categorization and structure.  Using the language of the survey respondents, this team will harmonize existing categories (created by the wiki team) with the language sourced from the much larger set of 5k+ respondents to ORGS.

Wiki http://wiki.occupy.net

The news aggregator currently pulls RSS feeds from occupation sites:

http://newswire.occupy.net/

The team will try to use some of the same categorization for this site to make it more navigable.

Video source http://www.ustream.tv/embed/recorded/19034432

One interesting aspect of the Occupy movement has been the widespread use of live streaming to document the camps, actions, and mobilizations in real time using computers, webcams, and cameraphones. On October 24th, I ran across the Occupy Streams site that provides a list of links to all of the livestreams run by Occupiers. I forwarded a link to the site to the general email list used by researchers at the Center for Civic Media:

>> On 10/24/2011 10:36 PM, Sasha Costanza-Chock wrote:
>> Someone make a map, with thumbnails, already
>> http://occupystreams.org/>>
>> schock

By the next morning, I found this reply in my inbox:

>> > On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Charlie DeTar wrote:
> ok.
> http://web.media.mit.edu/~cfd/occupystreamsmap/
> http://github.com/yourcelf/occupystreamsmap/
>> -charllie

Later, Charlie DeTar wrote a blog post describing the map that he created. Today, during the #OccupyData hackathon, CDT gave us a more detailed overview of the process he used to code the map. The video at the beginning of this post is a full recording of that overview, shot by Pablo Rey Mazon. Check it out!

Key Links

• Map: http://web.media.mit.edu/~cfd/occupystreamsmap/
• Post: http://civic.mit.edu/blog/cfd/occupy-streams-map
• Code: http://github.com/yourcelf/occupystreamsmap
• More info+ How to guide: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/occupystreamsmap

Content of http://brownbag.me:9001/p/occupystreamsmap

http://media.mit.edu/~cfd/occupystreamsmap
http://github.com/yourcelf/occupystreamsmap

A simple little mapping hack to show occupy live streams.

Source: https://github.com/yourcelf/occupystreamsmap/blob/master/get_livestreams_and_names.py

1. Scraping: http://occupystreams.org/

Look for patterns.
Caching http requests during development.
Deduplicating.

2. Geocoding

Google: https://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/usage.html

result = json.loads(get_cached_page(“https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=false&address=%s” % urllib.quote_plus(locname.encode(‘utf8’))

))

Don’t be afraid to hard-code results.

if locname.startswith(“Wall Sreet”): # [sic]
locname = “Wall Street, NY”
elif “London” in locname:
locname = “London”
elif “Denver” in locname:
locname = “Denver”

…
Source: https://github.com/yourcelf/occupystreamsmap/blob/master/index.html

3. Mapping

Leaflet: http://leaflet.cloudmade.com

Removing overlaps

Alternatives: http://padmapper.com, http://olwidget.org/olwidget/v0.4/doc/examples/info_cluster.html

Simplest, dirty hack: just add intentional error.

while (overlaps[[lat, lng].join(” “)]) {
lng += 0.02;
}

Popup generation — hackish javascript -> html

Mapquest OSM tiles: http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map

Construct icons for each point, with the livestream thumbnail.

I couldn’t find a thumbnail API for ustream. So I just used the ustream icon for those.

Live thumbnail updates for livestream: http://www.livestream.com/userguide/index.php?title=Live_Thumbnail_API

4. Geo-Search

Cloudmade API: http://developers.cloudmade.com/projects/show/geocoding-http-api

Automatically took first result.

Pros:

no tricky rules about displaying data on google maps from cloudmade.

Cons:

Some first results aren’t quite what you expect. Search for “Paris”.

To fix this issue, I tried contextualizing the result with the next-largest geographic entity, so when it was wrong, you’d at least know:

var names = [data.features[0].properties.name];
if (data.features[0].properties[“is_in:country”]) {
names.push(data.features[0].properties[“is_in:country”]);
} else if (data.features[0].properties[“is_in:continent”]) {
names.push(data.features[0].properties[“is_in:continent”]);
} else if (data.features[0].properties[“is_in”]) {
names.push(data.features[0].properties[“is_in”]);
}

if (data.features[0].properties.population) {
names.push(“<br />Population: ” + data.features[0].properties.population);
}$(“.results”, “.search”).html(names.join(“, “));

Twitter research #spanishrevolution http://15m.bifi.es/

http://15m.bifi.es/index_en.php

We’ll be migrating key sections of the wiki over here during the coming weeks, but currently there’s a lot more information available there than on this site. Check it out. Also note that anyone can join the wiki and edit it.

In solidarity with protestors around the world, #OccupyData is meant to serve as an intervention by offering experts and activists means to work together and think critically about the movement, its messages, and goals.
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2961/r-shief-opens-its-databases-of-twitter-

More info at: http://bit.ly/occupyhackathon

]]> http://occupyresearch.net/2011/12/02/preparing-occupydata-hackathon/feed/ 1 http://occupyresearch.net/2011/12/01/opening-occupyresearch-net/ http://occupyresearch.net/2011/12/01/opening-occupyresearch-net/#respond Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:37:45 +0000 http://occupyresearch.net/?p=9 We’ve decided to create a website for #OccupyResearch as a way to publish work that comes out  in a cleaner and easier way than the wiki. We will see how it evolves and evaluate its use in the future. For the moment you will find here announcements. We will have to figure out how not to duplicate information so that we do not have to update it in the wiki and here.