Occupy Research: Research by & for the Movement: Panel at Left Forum March 17, NOON in NYC

March 5th, 2012 · scrumbly · events, insights No comments

Occupy Research: Research by & for the Movement

Saturday, March 17, 2012, Noon-2PM! Join us in NYC
Left Forum Conference, Room E310 on the Pace University campus, NYC
Conference Panel Announcement

Join us for a critical discussion of social movement research and research justice for movement building, in the context of the Occupy Movement.

Knowledge can be used to build and maintain, as well as to upset, power. Scholars and activists on the Left are working with the 99% to develop participatory research and include a broader base in the process of forming research questions, choosing methods, developing research tools, gathering, analyzing, and disseminating results.

People are doing occupy research to:

understand engagement with the movement, who is participating in Occupy, who is not participating, and why;
challenge race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and other inequalities reproduced in the occupy movement;
share ideas, strategies, and tactics;
provide research and analysis for the 99%;
spread research skills, tools, and methods more broadly throughout the 99%

We are scholars, movement researchers, and activists working with and as Occupiers around the country and transnationally to develop research projects including: surveys of visitors to occupywallst.org and occupytogether.org; a general survey in multiple locations and across borders; analysis of occupy as a racial project (see occupyresearch.net for more info). We will discuss occupy research as a network to support movement research, what open research processes and methods can look like, and the critical role this work can play in supporting movement building. We’ll share (and invite attendees to share) findings to date, and some of the work ahead.

Panel coordinators:

Christine Schweidler, Director of Strategic Initiatives, DataCenter (datacenter.org) & OccupyResearch
Hector R. Cordero-Guzman, Ph.D., Professor, School of Public Affairs, Baruch College of CUNY
Martha Fuentes-Bautista, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media, MIT & OccupyResearch
Yvonne Yen Liu, Senior Researcher, Applied Research Center & Occupy Oakland Research Working Group

Join us for this panel: http://bit.ly/orleftforumpanel2012
Learn more about this amazing conference space: http://www.leftforum.org/
Register: http://bit.ly/lfregister2012
Join event on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/311405165580416/

OccupyResearch at Left Forum

February 23rd, 2012 · schock · events No comments

Occupy Research is organizing a panel at the upcoming Left Forum in NYC:

Occupy Research – Research by and for the Movement

This panel focuses on theoretical and practical developments around social movement research and research justice in the context of the Occupy Movement. Knowledge can be used to build and maintain, as well as to upset, power. Scholars and activists on the Left are working with the 99% to develop participatory research and include a broader base in the process of forming research questions, choosing methods, developing research tools, gathering, analyzing, and disseminating results. People are doing occupy research to:

* understand engagement with the movement, who is participating in Occupy, who is not participating, and why;

* challenge race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and other inequalities reproduced in the occupy movement;

* share ideas, strategies, and tactics;

* provide research and analysis to target the 1%;

* spread research skills, tools, and methods more broadly throughout the 99%

Panelists include scholars, movement researchers, and activists working with and as Occupiers around the country and transnationally to develop research projects including: surveys of visitors to occupywallst.org and occupytogether.org; a general survey in multiple locations and across borders; analysis of occupy as a racial project (see occupyresearch.net for more info). Panelists will discuss their research processes and methods, findings to date, plans for the future and the critical role of this work.

For more panels on Occupy at Left Forum see http://www.leftforum.org/content/occupy-debates-track-critiques-dialogues-and-questions-about-occupations

Upcoming Occupy Research calls

February 3rd, 2012 · schock · insights No comments

There are two upcoming open conference calls connected to Occupy Research:

1. Occupy Research open conference call #10:

Tuesday, Feb 7th, 3pm Pacific / 6pm EST
Dial: register to call in at InterOccupy: http://interoccupy.org/researchcall/
~~(559) 546-1200, Meeting ID: 622-245-653~~
Link to draft agenda: http://bit.ly/orcall10

2. Occupy Race research working group call #6:

Thursday, 2/16, 12pm ET/9am PT (1 hour)
Call-in number: 1 (800) 617-4268, PIN: 22988982
Propose agenda items and live notes: http://bit.ly/occupyrace6

To stay abreast of Occupy Research calls, events, announcements, and conversations in general, be sure to join the main mailing list: https://www.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/occupyresearch

Thanks for taking the OR general survey!

January 18th, 2012 · schock · survey No comments

OccupyResearch has gathered over 5,000 surveys from across multiple sites, both f2f and online. We’re now moving to the data analysis stage, the first steps of which are:

1. anonymizing the responses (some people put their contact info in the final open ended question) and

2. coding the responses to a question about which physical Occupy camp/location people participated in.

Once 2. is complete, we can cut the data by camp and provide that subset to each Occupy (so the Oakland Occupy Research working group will get early access to all the data from Oakland occupiers, Occupy Boston gets Boston occupiers, etc). We’re planning to organize a webinar & resources to help teams from each Occupation analyze their own data. If you’re interested in that part of the process please join the occupyresearch.net wiki and get on the mailing list!

In the future, we’ll clean, code, and analyze the full results, release a report, and release the anonymized complete data set for others to analyze as they’d like (under a creative commons license). Thanks to everyone who has participated in this process so far!

Another #Occupy Timeline Visualization

December 15th, 2011 · schock · occupydata, visualization No comments

@RyanneTKD posted this one from Team Utrecht:

Last Chance! Take the Occupy Research Demographic and Political Participation Survey by Jan 9th

December 11th, 2011 · schock · survey 8 comments

Quick links

Take the survey online: http://svy.mk/owsurvey-net.
Download the survey guide: http://bit.ly/OccupyResearchSurveyandGuide.
A prezi training on how to do the survey f2f: http://prezi.com/abentbthm65z/occupy-research-survey-training/

Tweet This!

Last Chance! Take #OccupyResearch survey: http://bit.ly/owsurvey-net Research by/4 the movement FTW! More info: http://bit.ly/owsurvey-info

Background:

The OccupyResearch network is pleased to launch this exciting survey,
which aims to create a better understanding of who engages with the
Occupy movement, and how — it includes questions about media,
communication, political activities, and more. The survey is open to
people living in any country, regardless of their level of involvement
with the Occupy movement. The more people we can reach with this survey,
the better we can reflect on this exciting time — so we invite you to
spread the word. You can pitch in by:

Posting it on social networks
Sharing it with your local Occupy activists and groups
Contacting or starting a research working group at an Occupy site
Conducting the survey yourself
Getting involved in a survey training workshop

Get started! Share this link to the survey with your networks:
http://svy.mk/owsurvey-net.

At Occupy sites, the survey can either be conducted online, if internet access is available in the field, or on paper. For both scenarios, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to conducting the survey, including detailed directions, a script, important information regarding consent, and many useful pointers.

Download that guide as a PDF here: http://bit.ly/OccupyResearchSurveyandGuide.

Coming soon: Interactive training materials for surveyors, and on-the-ground training at Occupy sites! Get in touch with us at owsgeneralsurvey@gmail.com and let us know how you’d like to be involved.

The survey is open until January 9th, 2011. Once closed, the data will be publicly available through the OccupyResearch website. The survey is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 General License.

The survey is being conducted by the OccupyResearch Network (http://occupyresearch.net), which includes over 200 activists, academics, and researchers, and DataCenter (www.datacenter.org), a U.S. based research organization. For more information about who is involved, see http://occupyresearch.net/surveys.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this exciting project, and happy surveying!

-OccupyResearch Survey Team

Number of #OWS Participants in Twitter

December 10th, 2011 · amac · occupydata, visualization 4 comments

The dataset with #ows hashtag contains approximately 5.3 million tweets contributed by 650K users between October 2011 and December 2011. The following graph shows the number of new users who posted a tweet on a given day (i.e., the users who hadn’t posted before that day):

The graph of the cumulative number of new users (i.e., number of unique users who had posted up until the given day) is below.

The final dataset and charts are here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ash6mAvb0VyZdER3RDFaY0JFNlVWMnlqQXZGSExaRVE

Occupy Hashtag Timeline Visualization

December 10th, 2011 · schock · occupydata, visualization One comment

This project is basically a free/libre open source implementation of trendistic. We started with the following sketch of Tweet volume by city, displayed in parallel:

Timelines by City

From there, Pablo used inkscape and libreoffice to create the following static mock-up, using the real data from the #OccupyData dataset from r-shief.org

(image pulled from @numeroteca‘s post at https://twitter.com/#!/numeroteca/status/145583946778951680/photo/1)

https://twitter.com/numeroteca/status/145583946778951680/

You can follow our development process on the project’s etherpad below: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/occupyhashtagtimeline

Metameme: Pepper Spray Cop Mosaic

December 10th, 2011 · whichlight · occupydata, visualization 3 comments - Tags: meem, peper spray cop

What could possible be more awesome than an #OccupyData hackathon? That’s right: the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme.

And what could be more awesome than a meme? That’s right: a metameme. One of our goals over the last couple of days has been to create just such a metameme. The basic idea is to start by generating a mosaic image of the Pepper Spraying Cop, composed of many tiny remixed Pepper Spraying Cop images. From our initial drawing on the whiteboard, we moved to start thinking about how to do a rapid implementation.

See http://brownbag.me:9001/p/pepperspraymosaic to follow the development

Update: [10.12.11 16.22] ET The game continues. Here some iterations from @numeroteca with metapixel:

Last iteration:

The how to guide and steps:

Occupy LinkViz first steps

December 10th, 2011 · schock · occupydata, visualization No comments

The code: https://github.com/yourcelf/occupydatatweets/
Update: Dec 30, 2011 now with all the tweets http://alltheurls.tirl.org/
Update: Dec 12, 2011 you can check the first online mock up with the #occupyboston tweets http://occupybostonlinks.tirl.org

At the Media Lab, after brainstorming various possible projects for the #OccupyData hackathon, we decided to focus on visualizing links sent around via tweets. The following video describes this idea further: