Northeastern professor develops map to help local news outlets track nearby protests

Imagine that you run a local news site and a protest breaks out in your community. You cover it, but you’d like to place it within a broader context. How many other protests are taking place near your city and town? What are they about?

Our Northeastern colleague Rahul Bhargava, a professor in the School of Journalism, has come up with a way of tracking demonstrations. He’s developed a map that can be embedded so community news outlets can show their readers what’s taking place nearby. You can set the map so that it depicts protests anywhere from within five to 100 miles. Rahul writes for Storybench, our media-innovation publication:

[I]t appears that local reporters are covering protests in their area, but not often connecting them to larger movements. That might be because coalitions like #50501 aren’t as well known as unions and long-standing activist groups; they don’t have communications people with long-standing relationships to journalists.

One approach to help reporters make those links for readers, and put individual events in a broader context, is to use data about local protests. Connecting this weekend’s rally to events over the last few weeks might connect dots for audiences that are seeing public displays of resistance. I wondered if I could quickly map protests in my area based on existing data sources.

The map is based on data compiled by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit, and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), part of the Harvard Ash Center.

The map is free, so give it a try.