How Is GIS Being Used To Map Resistance And Political Protests? by Sarah Bond.
From the post:
In the days since Donald Trump became president on January 20, 2017, millions of protestors have gathered in cities both big and small across the globe. And while presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that, “There’s really no way to quantify crowd numbers“–digital humanists, data scientists, librarians and geographers beg to differ.
Let’s check in on some projects attempting to use GIS to visualize the recent political protests, preserve data and keep activists informed.
Despite Conway’s remarks, a Google Doc started by Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut and Erica Chenoweth of the University of Denver soon began to collect crowd-sourced estimates from the Women’s Marches on January 20, 2017 organized by city, state and country. As they say on the public spreadsheet, “We are not collecting this data as part of a research project. We are doing this in the public interest. We are not affiliated with any other efforts to collect data on the demonstrations.” Over at Vox, graphics reporter Sarah Frostenson turned their data into a static map. Other researchers also weighed in. Doug Duffy, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, made an interactive map of Pressman and Chenoweth’s data here and posted the visualization to his GitHub page. He even cleaned the data for easy download and reuse (with attribution) by others.
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The post has links to a number of other projects that are mapping data related to resistance and political protests.
If that wasn’t encouraging enough, Sarah’s post appeared in Forbes, which isn’t known for being a hotbed of criminal syndicalism.
😉
Can using GIS to plan resistance and political protests be very far away?