Every Protest since 1979 - Visualized

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Did you know that there is a thing called the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone?  From the site,
The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world over the last two centuries down to the city level globally, to make all of this data freely available for open research, and to provide daily updates to create the first "realtime social sciences earth observatory." Nearly a quarter-billion georeferenced events capture global behavior in more than 300 categories covering 1979 to present with daily updates.
In short, a daily aggregation of new sources worldwide, since 1979. Epic scale doesn't even begin to cover it.
As you might imagine, this allows for all sorts of visualizations (that is the point after all!), and John Beieler has been doing some remarkably nifty work in this arena.
His Protest Map is pretty amazing, mapping every single protest since 1979, and showing it in one single animated map via CartoDB.  As ForeignPolicy puts it, some of the events to look for include
  • Strikes and protests in response to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's economic reforms.
  • Poland lighting up through the 1980s while Cold War-era Eastern Europe stays dark.
  • The escalation of apartheid protests in South Africa in the late 1980s.
  • The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of protests in Eastern Europe preceding the end of the Soviet Union.
  • Protests in Iraq coinciding with Operation Desert Storm in early 1991.
  • The explosion of protests in the United States since 2008 -- think Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements.
  • Iran's Green Movement protests after the presidential election in 2009.
  • The Arab Spring, with protests stretching across North Africa and the Middle East starting in 2011.
  • The persistence of protests in perennial hotspots like Kashmir, Tibet, and Israel and the West Bank.
All in all, amazing...
(Hat tip @omarkj)






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