Mapping Movements

This repository was created for the pressure cooker around Mapping movements: exploring the structure, vision and transformative potential of collections of movements for justice and sustainability, which was organised by Creative Coding Utrecht for the Copernicus Institute of the Utrecht University.

It documents an exploration to rethink "distance" for maps of social movements, or initiatives. In the maps researched by the Copernicus Institute, distance is often presented as geographical distance, and rendered by the placement of entries on a skewed world map (often using Mercator projection, which preserves angle, not distance). The experiment here uses various algorithmic methods to explore "similarity" as a means to map distance differently.

The project contains two steps. The first is documented in the Mapping Movements notebook, which explores different ways to calculate similarity using text embeddings, relying on the off-the-shelf Doc2Vec model.

In a second step this notion of distance-as-similarity is rendered on a map of movements, which changes depending on the initiative that is selected. There is thus no single, canonical rendering of the map, but a map that is different for each initiative.