Though the title is a bit silly, “Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics” (PDF), published by the United States Institute of Peace, is the best analysis I’ve read so far on digital activism research.  It takes a broad view, correctly diagnosing the current state of the field and making astute recommendations about methodology [...]

Technology for Transparency is a Global Voices project to map and evaluate technology projects that promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement around the world.  Recently the project’s co-directors, Rebekah Heacock and Renata Avila, wrote a post about lessons learned from the 37 case studies they’ve published so far.  It’s a commentary not only on tech for transparency, [...]

In my last post I spoke of my desire to see how big the digital activism “iceberg” is, to study the many unnoticed actions that precede highly visible “Twitter Revolutions” and mass digital mobilizations.  In my current task for the Global Digital Activism Data Set I am inputting posts from Global Voices‘ “cyber-activism” category.  I [...]

We at the Meta-Activism Project are proud to announce the launch of our first major project: the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS).  The data set will turn qualitative case studies of digital activism around the world into a non-proprietary quantitative machine-readable research tool.  It is an open project, created by volunteers and available to [...]

It seems that there are ever more people coming around to the reality that the piecemeal approach to digital activism isn’t working and that we need to begin more rigorous and comprehensive analysis. One of these people is Lucy Bernholz: founder of Blueprint Research + Design for Philanthropy, blogger at Philanthropy 2173, and fellow at [...]

Here at the Meta-Activism Project I frequently write about the need for better methodologies for understanding digital activism.  The endless stream of disconnected case studies and un-winnable debates between optimists and pessimists just aren’t cutting it anymore. Because I now find myself to be a methodology geek, I was really happy to see this analysis [...]

by Mary Joyce In many universities, technology conferences, and blogs there is now an active debate about the role of digital technologies in the global fight for human rights, democracy, and social justice. A few people are strongly positive, a few are unflinchingly negative, but most are cautiously optimistic. Still, the question is debated: Can [...]

by Mary Joyce The transparency/open gov people talk about data a lot (video below is just one example). Partially as a result, they seem to have figured out some good methodologies for making data about diverse political phenomena comparable and useful.  They realize that good policy decisions often require good data analysis. Yet these data [...]

One of the signs of a progress in a field of study is when you can take events and evaluate them against competing theories of the social universe. In current studies of digital activism, we are theorizing from cases, often without  bothering to check the historical record to see whether digital media can be credited [...]

by Mary Joyce A decade ago, academics began to study a crucially important type of extra-institutional political behavior: terrorism.  As always, government response did not wait on rigorous analysis.  A  week after the September 11th attacks, President Bush announced the cause of terrorism: the fundamental inconsistency of values (“they hate our freedom”), and a policy [...]