Media Impact Monitor

Media Impact Monitor makes you explore the world of protest and activism, and the impact that it has on societal discourse. Activists want to change the world -- whether it is about climate change mitigation, animal welfare, human rights, or any other important topic -- but it is hard to measure how successful they are at it. Media Impact Monitor takes all the data that is available, visualizes it, and makes statistical estimates of how successful different groups and different protest types are at creating attention and support for the cause that they care about.

• [x] Explore what protests are happening. We visualize all protests that are happening, and you can filter by time range, geographic area, and the topics and organizations that you are interested in. Currently we focus on climate protests in Germany, with plans to expand to more topics and countries.

• [x] Analyze the coverage of specific protest events. Find the events that you have attended or organized, and see how newspapers have reported about them. We find all articles about your event, analyze their sentiment towards the protest, as well as the support for the cause that you pursue.

• [x] Understand trends in societal discourse. The theory of change of how most protests achieve an impact is: via media attention, societal discourse, popular opinion, and eventually policy change. Not everything can be quantified, but some things can. We collect data and analyze it with regard to your protest and your cause, from:

  • [x] online newspapers
  • [x] print newspapers (fulltexts still todo)
  • [x] trends on Google and Wikipedia (wikipedia still todo)
  • [ ] social media
  • [ ] parliamentary debates
  • [ ] political processes
  • [ ] social surveys

• [ ] Quantify the impact of activism. Activists often count the amount of coverage about themselves, but that is a mediocre metric for measuring success. We use rigourous statistics from causal inference to estimate the impact of protests on general trends in attention and support for the area of concern of the protests. For example, how much more is climate policy discussed in newspapers, due to the protests? You can compare the impact of different organizations, and the impact of moderate and radical protest tactics. And since statistics is somewhat complicated, we explain our methods and show intermediate steps.

• [ ] Keep track of your organization. If you're part of an organization and want to measure your media impact, then we can collect data and compute statistics just for your organization. You can have your own dashboard with your own events, and see your impact on all the media sources that we monitor, or on your own outcome metrics. We collect citations from politicians and journalists about your work, and provide transparent estimates of your reach. Share your dashboard with your members and supporters to motivate them to donate and take action.

Documentation

• Backend documentation
• Frontend documentation

Team

The project team consists of:

• David Pomerenke (@davidpomerenke) – Data Science – M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence
• Lennart Klein (@kleinlennart) – Data Science – B.A. Political Science
• Lucas Vogel (@vogelino) – Frontend UI/UX Development – B.A. Interface Design

Contact

We are seeking activists and NGO employees to help us shape the tool: We are curious about your experience with media evaluation, your ideas and dreams, and your feedback on our prototypes!

Please send us an email or book a short meeting with us 🤗

Contributors

Lucas Vogel 💻 🎨 📖 📆	David Pomerenke 💻 🖋 🔣 📖 📆 🔬	Lennart Klein 💻 🔣 📖 📆 🔬
Add your contributions

License

We use a combined license, in short: Derivative works must be made open source (General Public License). Only ethical use is permitted (NoHarm Clause). Only noncommercial use is permitted (Commons Clause).

For details check out the full license text.

Partners

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