[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate: Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere

[Samuel Klein]

The Berkman Center just came out with a report on the public
discussions surrounding the SOPA-PIPA actions; drawing on the Media
Cloud work by Yochai Benkler and others.

It provides context for the discussions on the English Wikipedia, and
captures the differences between the grassroots and top-down decisions
by different organizations and media channels who took part in the
blackout.

An interactive time-visual shows how the conversation was driven at
different times by different communities:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/mediacloud/2013/mapping_sopa_pipa/#

SJ

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Publication Release: July 25
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the
release of a new publication from the Media Cloud project, Social
Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA
Debate, authored by Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia
Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling.

Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate

>From the abstract: In this paper, we use a new set of online research
tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed
legislation in the United States that was designed to give prosecutors
and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright
violations. Our study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining
text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to
map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the
mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.

This novel, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of the networked
public sphere supports an optimistic view of the potential for
networked democratic participation, and offers a view of a vibrant,
diverse, and decentralized networked public sphere that exhibited
broad participation, leveraged topical expertise, and focused public
sentiment to shape national public policy.

We also offer an interactive visualization that maps the evolution of
a public controversy by collecting time slices of thousands of
sources, then using link analysis to assess the progress of the debate
over time. We used the Media Cloud platform to depict media sources
(“nodes”, which appear as circles on the map with different colors
denoting different media types). This visualization tracks media
sources and their linkages within discrete time slices and allows
users to zoom into the controversy to see which entities are present
in the debate during a given period as well as who is linking to whom
at any point in time.

The authors wish to thank the Ford Foundation and the Open Society
Foundation for their generous support of this research and of the
development of the Media Cloud platform.

About Media Cloud

Media Cloud, a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard University and the Center for Civic Media at MIT,
is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to
answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the
content of online media. Using Media Cloud, academic researchers,
journalism critics, and interested citizens can examine what media
sources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use
in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one
media outlet to another. We encourage interested readers to explore
Media Cloud.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was
founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer
its development. For more information, visit
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/.