During a workshop at the Techno-Anthropological Lab, at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, I had the opportunity to play around with Graphryders. Since it was my first time on the platform, I tried to make sense of the data and proceeded with the following methodological steps.
Looking at the mess of intertwined nods, I needed to find a way to swim through it. Due to my personal interest as an activist-researcher, I decided to look up for words connected with decision-making, action and activism.
I choose first resilience. I analyzed this word in the network in 3 steps:
STEP 1: I wanted to see its neighborhood and see with which other nodes it is connected
STEP 2: I lower the co-occurrence intensity to a level of 4 to 6 edges. For resilience, these were: crisis, community farms, research question, sustainability, housing.
STEP 3: I looked at the posts related to resilience and I tried to draw and interpret similarities and bigger themes out of these posts. The comments weren’t really useful to me for that. I saw international issues and collective support as overall themes.
I reproduced the same approach with participatory design/collaboration
Stronger edges: design intervention, mobility, research question, community-based care.
Overall themes from the posts: transfer of knowledge, collaboration, community
And with sharing knowledge
Stronger edges: community-base care, migration, research question, neighborhoods
Overall themes from the posts: activism, community, collaboration
Louise Romain Watson, student researcher at the Techno Anthropological Lab, AAU CPH.