Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Journal Title
Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Volume Number
10
Issue Number
1-2
First Page
297
Last Page
321
Version
Publisher PDF: the final published version of the article, with professional formatting and typesetting
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND License.
Disciplines
Peace and Conflict Studies
Abstract
Protest events are a hallmark of social movement tactics. Large crowds in public spaces send a clear message to those in authority. Consequently, estimating crowd size is important for clarifying how much support a particular movement has been able to garner. This is significant for policymakers and constructing public opinion alike. Efforts to accurately estimate crowd size are plagued with issues: the cost of renting aircraft (if done by air), the challenge of visibility and securing building access (if done by rooftops), and issues related to perspective and scale (if done on the ground). Airborne camera platforms like drones, balloons, and kites are geospatial affordances that open new opportunities to better estimate crowd size. In this article we adapt traditional aerial imaging techniques for deployment on an “unmanned aerial vehicle” (UAV, popularly drone) and apply the method to small (1,000) and large (30,000+) events. Ethical guidelines related to drone safety are advanced, questions related to privacy are raised, and we conclude with a discussion of what standards should guide new technologies if they are to be used for the public good.
Digital USD Citation
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin; Juskauskas, Tautvydas; and Sabur, Md. Boby, "All the protestors fit to count: using geospatial affordances to estimate protest event size" (2018). School of Peace Studies: Faculty Scholarship. 2.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/krocschool-faculty/2