Tools for social movement scholars: Mapping the Digital Liberties Movement
I've just got my second attempt at mapping the digital liberties movement back from Issue Crawler. It seems like a good tool - Tim recommended it to me when I was looking around for a way to map links between different organisations.
In the chapter that I'm writing at the moment I'm arguing that this fuzzy thing, 'the digital liberties movement'* exists. Social movements are tricky things. They seem straightforward - of course there's an environmental movement, of course there's a feminist movement. But then you look more closely, and the borders are blurry, and you can think of these phenomena as just one movement or a whole heap of overlapping movements. This is particularly problematic with movements that have received relatively little attention within social movement scholarship.
So, while I believe there's a strong link between actors (organisations, individuals, coalitions, etc) addressing copyright issues, online censorship and surveillance, and free and open software, it takes some work to establish that all these bits and pieces actually constitute a single movement. One way to do it is to look at the emerging sense of a collective identity, such as shared terms for self-identification. Another way is by looking at the frames people are developing. Mapping is a nice complement to these, especially as the digital liberties movement has such a significant online presence.
I still want to play around with Issue Crawler a bit, and see if I can get the maps clearer (and work out what all the bits mean). It's good to have somewhere to begin in my attempts to understand how all these nodes fit together.
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* If you're thinking, 'but I haven't heard that label before', it's because I picked it. I still feel a bit odd about that, but after many serious discussions I've decided it's an acceptable (and possibly even useful) thing to do.