This week the US had the second impeachment trial for the former president Trump. I watched the entire trial through the CSPAN, the network that primarily televises the proceeding of the US federal government, live stream on YouTube. Additionally, I had the Twitter live stream opened. As the trial proceeded, I often had questions or wanted to seek clarification/more information from points raised during the trial by the lawyers/impeachment managers or commentary through Twitter. I thought it would be interesting to map my path throughout the trial.
Methodology
Rather than trying to document by hand all of my web activity, I relied on my browser history to record them. At the end of the day, I printed my browser history and I tried to label whether activity was done to answer a question, as reaction to Twitter commentary, or content algorithmically provided. This data resulted in the visualization below.
Visualization Design and Discussion
Each day of the trail, excluding Saturday, is represented by a purple circle which also represents the livestream of the trial and the Twitter live feed. Branching from the day are my web activities that result from watching the trial. They have been categorized as: YouTube videos, Tweets/Twitter accounts, printed news media (e.g. articles from NYT, CNN, and FiveThrityEight), video news media (e.g. clips from CNN and Fox), Google searches, and instant messages (e.g. Discord). In total, it forms a web for that day.
Some branches also include a square, a triangle, or dashed boxes; these represent notes for that branch of activity: question/personal inquiry (square), notification/algorithmically provided (triangle), or tangential queries not related to the trial (dashed boxes).
Looking over the week, I thought it was interesting that I did not perform any google searches on Thursday. However, after thinking about the timeline of the trial it makes some sense: Tuesday was focused on determining whether or not the US Senate had jurisdiction to hold the trial, Wednesday was the opening arguments for the impeachment managers, and Friday the former presidents council presented their defense. In each of these days, legal terms and precedent were introduced as well as the introduction of members of the defense and prosecution. On Thursday, the impeachment managers focused on video footage and summary of their case. Lost in this visualization is the context of the search and where I found the answer to my question. I felt that it was important to include the tangential queries as they represent learning that might not be considered as ‘focused’ or ‘on task’ by some.
Most of my activity seems to be from Twitter, again this makes some sense as I had the Twitter livestream commentary open the entire day. One side effect (or benefit) of the livestream is the automatic refresh of tweets and I did not count this refresh as activity. Twitter activity was defined as opening the tweet to view the comments or view the account that posted the tweet. I did not consider liking or following accounts as activity.
‘As the trial proceeded, I often had questions or wanted to seek clarification/more information from points raised during the trial by the lawyers/impeachment managers or commentary through Twitter. I thought it would be interesting to map my path throughout the trial.’
Great idea for a visualisation – there is something interesting here about tracking your explorations alongside the activities and developments of the trial. I suppose we could make useful links with watching a video lecture – at which points do we go off and seeking additional information, or want to ask questions of a peer group? Your visualisation certainly conveys the complexity of being engaged in an event – nice work!
‘Rather than trying to document by hand all of my web activity, I relied on my browser history to record them’
How do you think the results would have been different if you had attempted to manually record your web activity?
‘I felt that it was important to include the tangential queries as they represent learning that might not be considered as ‘focused’ or ‘on task’ by some.’
Indeed, and very interesting that you chose to create a boundary around these pathways, which served to highlight them. You’re right that the context would be really important here – just what were you ‘learning’ in these pathways. Nevertheless, thinking about what is ‘focused’ and what is not seems to be centrally important, and links to wider debates about the purpose of education.
Hi Jeremy! I am not sure if the results would have been different, but I think the experience would have. Most of the Google searches resulted in reading a Wikipedia article and the flow/ease of reading an article and clicking a hyperlink to a new article might have been broken if I was concerned about documenting my search history. Since I knew I was going to rely on my browser history I could jump around and open multiple tabs at once unfettered.
One benefit of recording by hand would be allowing the use of different devices – I was restricted to only using Google Chrome on my desktop rather than using Twitter on my phone or iPad.
This is a really fascinating visualisation; you have inspired me to want to do this when I next follow a story, to see where I go to for my information. Did it suprise you that you used Twitter so much: is it trusted, convenient or both?
Hi Tracey! I was a bit surprised. I generally don’t use Twitter but I found it to be great for keeping up to date with the flood of information. Most of the comments that I read on Twitter were echoing what was said during the trial, but there was a fair amount of tweets expressing opinion, interpretation, and rumors. As I was watched the trial, the Twitter feed generally lagged behind the video allowing me to compare my own opinion and interpretation with the tweets. If I had not watched the trial and solely watched the Twitter commentary feed, I would imagine that I would have been a bit more skeptical of tweets and there would have been an increase in searching for video recaps and other news articles. But, to be honest, I am not sure how much more skeptical I would have been given the context, politicalization, and the unfortunate predictability of the trial.