BACHELOR Assignment
The impact of #MeToo; a data visualization.
Type: Bachelor CreaTe
Period: Feb, 2018 - July, 2018
Student: Bruxvoort, X. van (Xadya, Student B-CREA,M-BIT)
Supervisors:
Situation:
#MeToo was started 12 year ago by Tarana Burke, because she felt she had to do something to raise awareness to sexual harassment in society. Last year, Me Too became popular because Alyssa Milano tweeted, as a reaction to the Weinstein scandal, that all women who experienced similar situations should tweet #MeToo to show the world the magnitude of the problem. On this tweet, 68.000 people reacted, 25.000 retweeted the tweet and 53.000 people liked the tweet.In the past half a year #MeToo kept being very popular on Twitter, but also outside social media.
On October 24th 2017, 1.7 million tweets including #MeToo were posted on Twitter. Next to this, the Oscars and Golden Globes were all about #MeToo. There are many women who came out about their experience.
Challenge:
The problem can be stated as the magnitude of the problem, sexual harassment, not being clear to society, as was also mentioned by Alyssa Milano. Unfortunately, there are many more problems which Me Too wants to tackle. Many of these can be found at the Time’s Up site (2017). These problems are, for example, that one in three women between 18 and 34 have been sexually harassed at work and 71% of them did not report it. To focus on the main problem, when Burke started the movement, it was mainly to help others and to show them that they are not alone..
What is also a problem at the moment is the fact that not many projects have been done about #MeToo and not many technical solutions are offered to tackle this problem. Because of this, people do not know the extent of sexual harassment.
Questions:
- How can a data visualization help in making the magnitude of sexual harassment in the world clearer to people in the Netherlands between 18 and 65 ?
- What technical framework can help finding a solution for raising awareness for sensitive topics by means of a data visualization?
Practical Aspects:
What is very enabling is the fact that is a very hot topic, but that also gives the constraining part; not much research has been conducted about this topic. Another challenge is handling the big data. There are many tweets available that include #MeToo, clue is to filter and analyse them and to eventually represent the data in a good manner. On the more ethical side, a challenge is that #MeToo is about a very sensitive topic which can easily hurt people, care should be taken.