Black lives matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and collective memory around online Social movements

Marlon Twyman, Brian C. Keegan, Aaron Shaw

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

Social movements use social computing systems to complement offline mobilizations, but prior literature has focused almost exclusively on movement actors' use of social media. In this paper, we analyze participation and attention to topics connected with the Black Lives Matter movement in the English language version of Wikipedia between 2014 and 2016. Our results point to the use of Wikipedia to (1) intensively document and connect historical and contemporary events, (2) collaboratively migrate activity to support coverage of new events, and (3) dynamically re-appraise preexisting knowledge in the aftermath of new events. These findings reveal patterns of behavior that complement theories of collective memory and collective action and help explain how social computing systems can encode and retrieve knowledge about social movements as they unfold.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1400-1412
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 25 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: Feb 25 2017Mar 1 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period2/25/173/1/17

Keywords

  • Civil rights
  • Collaboration network
  • Computer-supported collective action
  • Social computing
  • Social movements
  • User behavior modeling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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