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Tracing Actors in Protest Movements
Harnessing the Discursus Platform's Data Richness to Illuminate Key Players
In my journey with the Discursus project, achieving certain milestones in data richness has always been a priority. One such key milestone was the ability to extract and visualize the actors participating in protest movements. Today, I'm thrilled to announce that this feature is gradually being rolled out.
Visit our monitoring dashboard, and you will discover data on the actors involved in protest movements over the past 28 days. The user-friendly filters let you narrow down the data by protest movements, location, and dates.
Let's explore this new feature by analyzing the actors involved in the past week's protests.
It might look a bit dense at first, but the overall layout hints at several clusters of actors. Zooming into the bottom portion of the diagram, we can discern a tight cluster forming around a prominent figure, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.
Narrowing our search to events from the state of New York and actors involved in these events over the past 7 days, we get a clearer view of the actor clusters for NYC events.
The cluster on the far right is associated with a series of protests I've been monitoring recently. These protests were triggered by the death of a subway entertainer, reportedly choked by an ex-Marine who claimed the entertainer was exhibiting aggressive behaviour towards other passengers.
This actor data feature is just getting off the ground and, of course, we still have a substantial amount of work ahead to refine and expand it. Nevertheless, it's my hope that this new addition will enrich your exploration of protest movements. Your feedback and suggestions are highly valued, so please do not hesitate to reach out.