Part of “Demos: Solutions for Entity Mapping”. Presented by Kevin Connor, LittleSis.
For the video presentation
See Oligrapher at: http://littlesis.org/oligrapher
LittleSis: The opposite of big brother instead of watching down watching up at the powers that be and basically we describe LittleSis as sort of an involuntary Facebook powerful people, so its tracking information on the relationships and organizations. Pretty much focused on US.
Experience as an activist, recognizing a certain value putting together and understanding data on the networks of power people in organizations. Basically, having the knowledge understand what you’re up against in terms of the power structure.
So it comes from this experience, and putting a bunch of data in spreadsheets and thinking maybe there are other people putting this data in activism and journalism contexts.
LittleSis is online since 2009, mostly scrapping data and it’s also a Wiki, where you can add information.
Show a piece of the site, a visualization tool we call Oligrapher: Oligarchy + grapher.
We wanted to put out something together that would be less about exploring the data and more about telling stories with the successes of the data.
Show some inspirations for our work:
Mark Lombardi:
Sample of a map did early on using Oligrapher:
FCC Chairman Wheeler & staff: Telecom ties http://littlesis.org/maps/101-fcc-chairman-wheeler-staff-telecom-ties
Shows the workflow for creating a map
A question for us became how can we kind of focus the eye in some parts of the map and walk people through a story rather than the whole data. These maps have a lot of work behind but what we are trying to do is to present the story in a more narrative way.
So what we did was develop a tool that allows you to walk through the map and present different parts of a narrative.
About questions:
- LittleSis has a Bookmarklet where you are reading an article and adding relationships based on the article.
- The data comes from a mix of sources, scrapping and users. 70% are users adding information, 30% staff.
- Some media outlets are embedding the maps but not creating that much. We are starting to see more independent journalists and bloggers using it.
- Is it one dataset for everyone? Yes, it’s one big dataset for everyone.
Sample map: http://littlesis.org/maps/259-profiting-from-ferguson
New map page: http://littlesis.org/maps/new
User maps
Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion - Preet Probes Deeper
Widespread Fracking in the Name of North American Energy Security: See the Marfa Lights
REMI University of Colorado, Boulder
Who is behind the Rams stadium deal? (original)