We’re pleased to announce the release of the Occupy Research General Survey (ORGS) facet browser. You can use this tool to drill down into the more than 5,000 responses to the Occupy Research General Survey.  For example, you might like to know about the survey responses of occupiers who are from California, and have been to a camp “many times”. Or responses from people who donated money, food, or goods, and also attended a general assembly. Select as many facets of the dataset as you’d like, and share your findings via unique links to your set of selections. Enjoy, and please tweet/share using the hashtag #occupyresearch! The ORGS facet browser is by Charlie de Tar.

Click here to try it out.

More info in the occupydatanyc site.

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.

June Po and Renan Escalante joined us for the afternoon of the second day. They were trying to get demographic data from twitter feeds, specifically the r-shief #f29 dataset, initially by looking for keywords that could be linked to race/ethnicity. For example, they began by looking  for “Black,” but found that this approach mostly returned false positives (eg Blackberry). Their next step was to try and look for co-occurence of ‘race’ and ‘Black,’ but that didn’t work either. The third approach they tried was to look for hashtags with terms related to race, but that didn’t produce many results either. In the future they’re thinking about other approaches: for example looking at twitter usernames, looking at RT networks, and so on.

If you participate in the Occupy movement, what TOP THREE concerns motivate you TO PARTICIPATE?

The larger the word, the more people from the survey responded with it. This is a processing app that will ideally be both animated and interactive. Next steps are to make a smarter text layout so that more of the responses are legible.

A bunch of visual explorations from today can be found here.

This is a collaboration between Nadia Afghani and Gilad Lotan.

An older version:

Based upon self-reported ZIP codes of residents, states with the highest survey participation included:
California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Washington.

Map by Don Blair and Chris Schweidler, using GeoCommons.

Link to this data: http://geocommons.com/maps/152629

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.