Yesterday the Meta-Activism Project launched its most recent product, Civil Resistance 2.0, which is not really “ours” and not really a “product.”  It’s a crowdsourced initiative that will eventually be authored by people both inside and outside our organizations and it does not exist in physical space, just in the cloud.  This got me thinking [...]

We now know a tremendous amount about the Kony 2012 campaign and excellent analysis keeps rolling in: on the Ushahidi blog, Patrick Meier has posted a variety of responses from Ugandans and Ethan Zuckerman has posted a gorgeous visualization from Gilad Lotan of the first 5000 Kony tweets (see left). At a panel at SXSW yesterday, [...]

Reading Ethan Zuckerman’s posts about openness at yesterday’s Media Lab members’ meeting inspired me to finally publish the Global Digital Activism Data Set codebook (PDF).  We’ve been putting off posting it for a while, as it seemed never to be quite ready, but then, remembering the wise words of Clay Shirky (“publish then filter”) Research [...]

There are two important causal questions for digital activism researchers: what causes digital activism and what does digital activism cause?  The former is easier to answer.  The latter is more difficult but also more interesting. These two questions can be visualized in linear time where the causes of digital activism (from macro contextual factors like [...]

In the Middle East, activists have used digital tools to bring about  dramatic political change under repressive regimes, so why has digital activism had such a lackluster effect in a democracy like the US? The Global Digital Activism Data Set (below) shows that the US has more instances of digital activism than any other country, [...]

Purist arguments of cyber-optimism and cyber-pessimism are becoming increasingly irrelevant as evidence of digital technology’s ability to both empower and repress accumulates.  However, what is the basis of this argument beyond anecdotalism of a slightly broader scope? I would argue that in the past five year we have witnessed a pendulum swing from activist advantage [...]

Today I watched The Name of the Rose, a gloomy film about a medieval Sherlock Holmes named William of Baskerville (just in case the Holmes connection was not otherwise evident). It got me thinking about inductive and deductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning we move from the aggregation of  discrete observations to create a theory that [...]

I’ll be presenting a break-out session on open digital activism research and the Global Digital Activism Data Set at Personal Democracy Forum today in New York, details below.  I’ll also report back on any feedback I get from the session. Getting Beyond Anecdata: The Global Digital Activism Data Project Mary Joyce (moderator) with Zeynep Tefecki [...]

Note: In the interest of open research, we are sharing infographics of our in-process project, the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS). We hope that this transparency will elicit original perspectives and constructive critique. Previous posts here and here and here interpret these visualizations in detail, but I thought it might also be useful to [...]

Note: In the interest of open research, we are sharing infographics of our in-process project, the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS). We hope that this transparency will elicit original perspectives and constructive critique. Previous posts are here and here. Above is a bubble graph of the most popular sources in the GDADS, those which [...]