A story of protest
We are quite interested in understanding what public opinion is, how it has been measured and conceptualized in the past, to imagining and attempting to implement how a broad range of public thought and experience can be analyzed and measured in the future, given the affordances of contemporary.
The Challenge
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social-political movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience against unjust incidents of police brutality as well as other racially motivated violence against the African American communities in the United States. In 2020, the movement arose to the public domain and gained nationwide and international attention, starting with the public’s rage regarding George Floyd’s death. An estimated 15 million to 26 million people, though not all are active members of the original organization, participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, making Black Lives Matter one of the significant movements in United States history. The movement advocates defunding the police and fund African American communities along with alternative emergency response models directly. By researching who is supporting the BLM, where they are located, and how they expressed themselves, we plan to visualize the movement, sourcing from the US Crisis Monitor which has been updating data regarding extended coverage back to the week of George Floyd’s killing in May. In addition, we would also utilize collected data from Twitter hashtags via web scraping (using an NLP model from MIT Media Lab). We also intend to explore the social, political, and economical influences instigated by the protest, including widely-supported public announcement and opinions as well as their outcomes. An additional theme of visualization we are interested in exploring is the relationship between the ACAB (all police are bad) Movement and their associated development with changes in the frequency of the cities’ crime rate. We will take into consideration the fact that these numbers would be amplified during the co-occurring pandemic. Through this visualization, we hope to bring forward the insight of modern US culture regarding political justice and ethical baselines, especially in such difficult times.
The Design Process.
Our goal is to design and advance new strategies for visualizing the protests, public opinion behind them, paying particular attention to the need to understand perspectives as well as gauge preferences.
Related Work
Indeed, there have been many projects related to our topic. Firstly, The US Crisis Monitor, supported by the Bridging Divides Initiative at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs’ Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, has one specific project to map out the data of projects via Tableau, including locations of protests across the country, frequency of protests monthly and so on.
Reference links:
https://acleddata.com/2020/10/29/regional-overview-united-states18-24-october-2020/
https://www.gyana.com/post/10-charts-with-vital-black-lives-matter-data/
https://onlineresearchandbigdata.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/trend-analysis-with-gephi/
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
Audience and Questions
Our target audience are the public who want to learn more about the social, political and economical influences instigated by the protest, including widely supported public announcement and opinions as well as their outcomes. There are several questions that deserve investigation: Where are these protests happening? Who is supporting the protests in physical spaces? What is the public opinion to the protest on social media? What are the outcomes of these protests? How many people have been injured or killed during the movement? Have black communities’ lives been improved so far in terms of education, health care? How could people express themselves while avoiding being exposed to the COVID-19?
Storytelling strategy
In order to drive people to learn more about protests, we started with the recent BLM protests by proposing questions about what happened in the United States, what caused these protests, what happened in the United States and what about protests in other countries.
These questions further led us to think about ways to visualize the datasets such as heat mapping, bar charts, and radar charts. Color legends represented for people with different identities in the protests deserved the same attention.
Prototyping
- Geo_Map Chart()
Black Lives Matter in 2020 may be the largest movement in US history. The George Floyd protests were a series of police brutality protests that began in Minneapolis in the United States on May 26, 2020. Civil unrest and protests began as part of international responses to the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who was killed during an arrest after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes as three other officers looked on and prevented passers-by from intervening.Chauvin and the other three officers involved were later arrested. (Wikipedia)
Local protests began in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota before quickly spreading nationwide and to over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Polls in summer 2020 estimated that between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in U.S. history. Protests continued until early November. (Wikipedia)
- Points_Matrix chart()
George Floyd’s protests brought public attention to police brutality. The story of protest starts from the data of police shootings in the United States in the last 50 years. A matrix chart is constructed by a list of circles in the sequence of timeline. Each circle represents an instance of a life taken by the force of execution.
The color of the circle indicates the classification according to race's skin color, which aims to stress the issue that not only about police shootings but about the ethnic prejudice that exists deep down in the American society.
- Radar Chart()
A dataset of protest activities in the United States from earlier 2017 to mid 2020, provides a broader perspective about the protests. People protested for different reasons, while, during some specific periods, certain topics were more popular. This radar chart is presenting a contrast of the popularity of each category with particular events, according to the amount of attendees in the selected year, or month.
In addition to the contrast between the purposes of protests, which creates a basic impression about those which have more people engaged in, this chart also served as a tool to contrast the records between different points of time. (e.g. compare the area map of 2018 to the area map of 2020, and to dig in depth, compare the aera map of June 2018 to the area map of July 2020).
- Waffle_Histogram chart()
Moreover, the radar chart itself served as a filter, each selection interacts with a matrix histogram for the year and a waffle diagram for the month, which are particularly displaying the related media press (number of articles), and illustrating the portion of each category of event. The information this provides is also showing the impact to the public as well as the consequence of certain protest activities.
- Donut chart()
As a symbol of modern civilization, protest has been prevailing globally through contemporary history. Dated back to 1950, a dataset traced activities in different countries, marked down the methods participants engaged in their protests, as well as the timespan.
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