Visualizing Social Networks/Reimagining Social Movements

In this talk, I will describe our Mellon-supported team project, which brings together faculty in Journalism, English, Law, Design, Computer Science and Bioinformatics to analyze social justice movements at the global and local scales on Twitter. Our test case is #BlackLivesMatter and related hashtags that were invoked on Twitter in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in 2014. To perform this research, we use network analysis and visualization to present a macro-level picture of Twitter activity and viral hashtags after the event, and we use machine learning text mining methods to provide an overview of the semantic discourse of the millions of tweets that defined the social movement globally.