A Method for Systematically Observing and Recording Collective Action

Schweingruber, David; McPhail, Clark

doi:10.1177/0049124199027004001

Cited by 56 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Moreover, we use the cut-point of 10,000 participants because this represents a significant number of people at a protest event. Because previous research suggests that protests over 1,000 people are actually quite rare (Schweingruber and McPhail 1999), we feel comfortable in conceptualizing the 10,000 figure as large. This is also a natural cut-point in the protest dataset since there is no clustering in observations around 10,000, allowing us to feel confident that despite problems with estimates of participants, we can have a reasonably high degree of certainty that we have not categorized protest erroneously in one of the two groups.…”

Section: Figure 2 Number and Size Of Protests Over The Immigrant Righmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

Wallace

Zepeda-Millán

Jones-Correa

2013

American J Political Sci

104

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This article utilizes data from the Latino National Survey (2006) to analyze temporal and spatial variation in the effects of the immigrant rights marches in 2006 on Latino attitudes towards trust in government and self‐efficacy. Using a unique protest dataset, we examine the effects of proximity and scale by mapping respondents’ specific geographic location against the location of the marches as well as size of the protests using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We find that local proximity to small marches had a positive impact on feelings of efficacy, whereas large‐scale protests led to lower feelings of efficacy. The results shed light on the role localized political events can play in shaping feelings towards government, the importance of conceptions of space and time to the study of social movements, and the positive outcomes that can result from contentious politics.

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Section: Figure 2 Number and Size Of Protests Over The Immigrant Righmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

Wallace

Zepeda-Millán

Jones-Correa

2013

American J Political Sci

104

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“…We later reorganized and reduced the taxonomy to four areas of the human anatomy: face, voice, hands, and legs. We focused on the parallel or convergent directions two or more persons are facing; the sounds (e.g., vocalizations or verbalizations) that two or more persons are voicing; the manipulations (e.g., gesturing, clapping, embracing) in which the hands of two or more persons are engaging; and the leg posture and movement of two or more persons in standing, sitting, walking, kneeling, or lying (McPhail and Schweingruber 1999; Schweingruber and McPhail 1999).…”

Section: Individual and Collective Actions In Gatheringsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With funding from the National Science Foundation, John McCarthy and I were able to recruit, train, and deploy a sufficient number of observers to take systematic records over time of large gatherings to generate a picture of the changing configurations of individual and collective action 5 . Details about the training manual (McPhail, Schweingruber, and Berns 1997), training procedures, and deployment of the observers are reported elsewhere (Schweingruber and McPhail 1999). I briefly repeat here how observers were trained to enter their estimates of the proportion of people participating in the elementary forms of collective action (EFCA) and how we constructed our measures of participation reported here.…”

Section: Individual and Collective Actions In Gatheringsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Crowd and Collective Behavior: Bringing Symbolic Interaction Back In

McPhail

2006

Symbolic Interaction

Self Cite

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Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in August 2005, this article's objective is to illustrate the importance of symbolic interaction in the formation of temporary gatherings, in the dynamic alternation between individual and collective actions that comprise those gatherings, and in the dispersal processes that bring such gatherings to an end. In reviewing the phenomena to be explained, I also call attention to the limitations of the concepts of “the crowd” and of “collective behavior.” Finally, to make sense of the dynamic variation and alternation between individual and collective actions, and the variation in the latter, I champion and extend G. H. Mead's theory of the act as a closed‐loop, negative‐feedback model of purposive action. No lesser model of agency and action is adequate to the challenge of understanding and explaining the phenomena in question.

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“…Conversely, the sociological realm exhibits some relevant studies. Schweingruber and McPheil in [19] has built a model for characterizing "collective actions-in-common", i.e., actions performed spontaneously by several people in coordination. This study, though not specifically centered on viewers, but rather on various forms of crowd, singles out seven dimensions for the analysis of crowd behavior: orientation (facing), vocalization (producing sounds other than words with mouth), verbalization (uttering words), vertical locomotion (movement of the body over the same point on the ground), horizontal locomotion (movement of the body from one point on the ground to another), gesticulation (meaningful bodily configuration based on fingers, hands, and arms movements mainly), and manipulation (using hands to applaud or to strike, carry, throw, pull, etc.).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

ATTENTO: ATTENTion Observed for Automated Spectator Crowd Analysis

Conigliaro

Setti

Bassetti

et al. 2013

Human Behavior Understanding

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Abstract. We propose a new type of crowd analysis, focused on the spectator crowd, that is, people "interested in watching something specific that they came to see" [1]. This scenario applies on stadiums, amphitheaters etc., and shares some aspects with classical crowd monitoring: actually, many people are simultaneously observed, so that perperson analysis is hard; however, here the dynamics of humans is more constrained, due to the architectural environment in which they are situated; specifically, people are expected to stay in a fixed location most of the time, limiting their activities to applaud, support/heckle the players or discuss with the neighbors. In this paper, we start facing this challenge by considering hockey matches, locating a videocamera 25-30 meters far from the bleachers, pointing at the crowd: in this scenario, aggregations of spectators that exhibit similar behavior are detected, and the behavior is classified into a set of predefined classes, highlighting the overall excitement. To these aims, in a first step we focus on individual frames, clustering local flow measures into spatial regions. The clustering is then extended by adding the temporal axis into the analysis, looking for non-randomic spatio-temporal clusters; to this aim, the Lempel-Ziv complexity is considered. This way, choral activities can emerge, indicating for example fan groups belonging to different teams. After this, with the adoption of entropic measures, the degree of excitement of such groups can be quantified.

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A Method for Systematically Observing and Recording Collective Action

Cited by 56 publications

References 21 publications

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

The Crowd and Collective Behavior: Bringing Symbolic Interaction Back In

ATTENTO: ATTENTion Observed for Automated Spectator Crowd Analysis

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