Day 1: The New Collectivism

Word map from our introductions and initial group discussion (wordle)

The introductory session for our workshop started with a discussion of the themes and issues emerging from civic action in Moscow. A key theme that emerged from our discussion was an idea of “The New Collectivism” – that new forms of collective action can and will emerge that mirror historical values of collectivism.

Motivating and mediating the passionate discussion about the opportunities and threats to collective action were post-it notes and Shriya from Partizaning transcribing the key points of our conversation. The post-it notes reflected the skills and interests of the participants. These post-its were then aggregated, analyzed, and presented by two groups.

Human aggregators of post-it notes

While the summary presentations of the skills and interests of the group  were presented, two visualizations were generated from the transcribed participant introductions. The two visualizations generated were a word cloud and a phrase net. Both describe the relationships of words. The former to occurrence (number of times it was used) and the latter to relationships of words and the incidence of occurrence.

This exercise in a computed aggregation and participant aggregation showed the capacities of both methods, but also the illusion of visualizations as somehow less subjective – a purer representation of participant’s self-representation. However, the image of calculated relations obscured the subjectivity of the source – a transcription of participants self-representation.

From the exercise emerged our method of quantified and qualified, low-tech and high-tech approach to visualizing for agents of change.

Word map from our introductions and initial group discussion (phrase net)