Hello, World!

Welcome to the blog of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a.k.a. CCC.

CCC is a public-interest and scholarly project that documents political crowds in public spaces in the United States. CCC emerged in early 2017 from an improptu collaboration between Professors Erica Chenoweth (Harvard University) and Jeremy Pressman (University of Connecticut), who both found themselves that January trying to collect data on participation in the inaugural Women’s March.

Over the following four years—and with much help from Count Love and a bevy of research assistants and volunteers—CCC’s database has grown into one of the most comprehensive, freely available sources of near-real time information on protests, marches, demonstrations, strikes, and related political gatherings in the contemporary U.S. By the end of the Trump era on Inauguration Day 2021, the project had collected and shared structured data on roughly 60,000 distinct events in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Numerous academic and press pieces have used CCC data, including a 2018 article in the journal Mobilization on trends in U.S. protest activity between the first and second Women’s Marches; a 2020 New York Times story on the historic scale of the Black Lives Matter uprising; and a 2021 Los Angeles Times piece on protest activity in California under Trump. The Consortium has also published multiple pieces in the Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage forum, including a June 2020 post on the geographic breadth of the George Floyd protests and a February 2021 post offering an overview of U.S. protest activity in the Trump era. In 2020, we also launched a GitHub repository, where we share a compiled and augmented version of the data posted in monthly chunks on CCC’s data page, and a data dashboard that lets users visually explore and interact with the data.

With this blog, we aim to do three things.

• First, we hope to provide insight into trends in contentious politics in the contemporary U.S. through data visualizations and short write-ups on things we discover as we generate and explore the data ourselves.
• Second, we hope to familiarize a wider audience with CCC’s data and the ways it can be used in scholarly research and data journalism. If you think our posts are insightful, please share them with your colleagues and friends.
• Finally, by sharing the code we use to explore and analyze the data and to generate visualizations, we hope to make it easier for other scholars and journalists to use CCC data and follow through on their own ideas.

So, that’s where we’re going. No formal schedule, no paywall—just a desire to squeeze more value out of this tremendous resource, which we think we’ve only begun to tap. See you again soon.