I created a visualization to document and reflect upon my participation in protests and marches in 2017.

The challenge

Like many Americans, 2017 marked the first year in my life I exercised a core aspect of my citizenship; the ability to protest.

At the same time, a common thread among feminists and other activist-scholars is the notion that archiving is a form of activism, identified by some as a “social movement archival activism, often allied to a progressive, democratizing, and anti-discrimination political agenda” [1, 2]. Some even use digital, community-oriented archives for community building [3].

My goal was to create a visualization not only allowed me to contemplate and contextualize my own participation in protest movements, but also build a proof of concept for developing a crowdsourced tool for people to document and historicize lessons learned from their own protest experiences.

The data

Using Facebook, I drew up a list of the protests or marches I was interested in or attended during 2017. For each event, I recorded the date, time of day, and location. For the events I attended, I wrote a description and some of the thoughts and questions I had at the time.

The design

I used Open Street Map to get a high-quality vector of the Washington, D.C. area. First, I placed the locations of all events. Then, I elected to arrange the thoughts associated with each event counter-clockwise, based on time. However, the number of text boxes cluttered the map. Instead, I placed each text box next to its associated location and used arrows to order the events together.

I used the tool iWantHue to generate a pallette of maximally perceptively distinct colors. Each event was often associated with its own “brand,” or visual language. I selected colors for each event based on the closest approximation in the pallette. Each arrow fades from the color of one event to another.

Future directions

I am excited at the prospect of developing a tool for anyone to submit and organize their experiences and lessons learned in protests. Often times, protests can form the end point in a discourse. However, protests also mark inflection points in a continuing conversation. A single observation or musing near stagnant in isolation; a community of protesters is more significant.

Sources

1. Flinn, A. (2011). Archival activism: Independent and community-led archives, radical public history and the heritage professions. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 7(2).
2. Bly, L., & Wooten, K. (Eds.). (2012). Make your own history: Documenting feminist and queer activism in the 21st century. Litwin Books.
3. Flinn, A., & Alexander, B. (2015). “Humanizing an inevitability political craft”: Introduction to the special issue on archiving activism and activist archiving.