Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr

[dkf]

From rortybomb:

One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr.  At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression.  It is highly recommended.

DATA

The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.  Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself.

In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site.  It doesn’t read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?), just the html text.  After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points.

It’s a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.  For instance, I found this adorable little rascal, pictured below, mucking up the algorithm, as the first version of the code assumed all the ages would have two digits.  I found that he, and the sign his mom made for him as a confessional to her son, hit me a ton harder than any of the more direct signs of despair in this economy:



More

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/parsing-the-data-and-ideology-of-the-we-are-99-tumblr/

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Mike Konczal is a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, who also blogs at New Deal 2.0. He works on financial reform, the 21st century economy, unemployment, inequality, access to financial services and what it means to have a social contract in a financialized, post-industrial economy. He’s written papers for the Roosevelt Institute about financial reform several times as well as the deficit and the unemployment crisis. His work has appeared at The American Prospect, NPR’s Planet Money, Slate, Baseline Scenario, Atlantic Monthly’s Business Channel and The Nation. Originally from Chicago, he enjoys finance, economics, sociology, theory, tacos and center-left politics on the side.

[Jane Austin]

1. Do you have Evernote?

You can get it here for free:

http://www.evernote.com/

You can save the document as a pdf to Evernote (just go to print, and if you have Evernote installed, it will give you the option to save it as a PDF to Evernote.

Then you can search Evernote for any term, typed, handwritten or whatever.

We use it for everything - receipts, documents, things I read here that I might want to see later. As long as you can remember any word in what you've saved it will find the documents. "Bank" or "job" might be words you'd want to search for.

The beauty of Evernote is that you don't have to stop and figure out where to file something. Because it will search every document you've saved, like zeroing in on the right paper in a huge pile of papers on your desk.

[dkf]

2. Sorry this is a post from a blogger I think...

I am not savvy enugh to tackle this.