As part of its mission to amplify the work of other scholars and activists, the Nonviolent Action Lab is building an annotated compendium of data sets relevant to the analysis of nonviolent action, other forms of contentious collective action, state responses to them, and their effects and effectiveness. In traditional fashion, each entry in the compendium will describe what the data set covers, how it was produced, and how to access it. More novelly, each entry will also apply lenses from critical theory related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and state-centrism to cast a skeptical eye on the production and application of the data set in question.
This compendium will make two major contributions to the field. First, it will help to catalyze new research on nonviolent action and its impacts by making it easier for scholars, students, and journalists to find and use valuable materials (and, perhaps, to avoid highly problematic ones). Second, by foregrounding issues of equity and ownership in the annotations, the compendium will contribute to, and help to normalize, efforts to raise awareness of power imbalances and fairness in the production and analysis of data.