Celebrating Climate Activism: a Data-Driven Approach
In September 2019 alone, more than six million people stopped work or school to go out into the streets and fight for climate justice (The Guardian, 2019). Climate parades of this magnitude were until this moment, unprecedented, and mark the transition of environmental activism into the main-stream.
Since then, Manlio Massimetti, Orestis Ioannidis, and myself (Robert Carr) have been working on a project to study and celebrate the rise of young climate movements. As part of the Digital Society School (DSS) data-driven transformation track, we were tasked with using data to create a prototype which illustrates this rise. Guided by our coach Carlo de Gaetano, we worked in conjunction with two clients from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam: the sustainable initiative Re-Set and the Visual Methodologies Collective. By the time the bi-annual DSS showcase rolled around on January 22, we designed a product that we were very proud of, but that also required a lot of hard work. While there were some bumps and bruises along the way, the team ultimately came out on top, and we certainly have something to show for it.
The Final Prototype
We created a web-platform called See you on the Streets, a Digital Climate Parade. It can be accessed at the following link:
http://seeyouonthestreet.dss.cloud
This website marks the culmination of several months of research into the rise of climate activism. At the start of the semester, our team was tasked with creating an open and accessible data set that tells the story of young climate movements. Mainly through social media scraping, we’ve managed to collect a plethora of data that illustrates the climate activism phenomena made popular by charismatic individuals like Greta Thunberg and disruptive movements like Extinction Rebellion.
What exactly is the platform and what does it do? Essentially, See you on the Streets is based off a dataset that contains images from climate demonstrations between the years 2015 and 2019. Images from four main climate movements are present (Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour) as well as from individuals who used the official hashtags of the movements within their post. The platform is a visualization of the dataset where users can filter and sort images by movement, date, level of engagement, hashtag(s) used, and more. The intention with the filters and sorters is to enable the exploration of the recent months of climate activism through photos by giving individuals freedom in how to arrange them and subsequently derive meaning. The filters and sorters are instruments we provide that can be combined in many different ways to create alternate storylines from the same base data. Furthermore, users are able to click on individual photos to bring up a pop-up box with more details about the given photo and post it originates from. The website also has a Lab area, where users can analyze the textual communication from the movements
We want to celebrate the growth of climate movements and show the world that climate activism is not just a series of isolated incidents. People are coming together from all ends of the globe in support of the same goal: changing human behavior to improve the conditions and the health of our one and only planet. These coming-togethers of unprecedented magnitude should not go uncelebrated. It is with this in mind that we present our platform as a space to exhibit, understand, and analyze the rise of climate movements and the accompanying activism through online visual content.
Project History
Of course, the idea for this concept did not just arise out of the blue. Indeed, we spent several months brainstorming, researching, and testing different methodologies to understand how best to tackle the problem of creating an open and accessible data-set that tells the story of young climate movements. For the first sprint, we started with a web-page which compiled information about current and past social movements related to climate activism.
This step can be seen at the following link: http://climatemovements.dss.cloud. The video to the left is just one of several features present on the website. Once we learned about who our subjects of study were, we decided to zoom into one, namely Extinction Rebellion (XR), to get an idea of how they communicate and to formulate a methodology for researching further climate movements. This was the second sprint: we created posters and graphs to show how XR generated online engagement and how they were perceived by global news outlets.
For the third sprint, we re-expanded our study to the four climate movements mentioned in the third paragraph of this article. We began collecting all the data, and by the time the fourth sprint arrived, we were ready to come up with our concept. We used a stakeholder map and analyzed the relationships between them to aid us in devising the concept. In the end, we came up with the idea of an online climate parade that combined images of several different protests all into the same digital space. By giving users the power to sort and filter the data, we believe our prototype both holds analytical value as well as appropriately celebrates the phenomenon of taking to the street to fight climate change.
Concluding DSS & Future Steps
Now that our time at DSS is almost up, it is time to reflect, and look to the future. We have learned a lot over the past several months: researching, coding, and designing of course, but also cross cultural skills as well as whats its like to be part of an interdisciplinary team. We learned about conflict resolution, compromise, and making sure everyone feels like their opinions are respected. The DSS experience was an extremely valuable one that I’m sure we will all take forward with us for many years to come. Not to mention all the networking possibilities these past few months have offered.
As a team, we are currently looking for other parties to work with in the coming months so that we can continue to improve and develop the platform. We hope to create a sales pitch in the coming days that we will send to potential partners in hope of finding a match.
It certainly feels like time has flown by. We’ve come a long way as individuals, and it’s been amazing to see our concepts take shape. While it’s now time to say goodbye to DSS, it’s hopefully only the beginning for our team and the platform we’ve created.
As the quote from Alexander Bell goes, “when one door closes, another door opens.”
