Everyday Sexism Book Cover Contest

You may know @EverydaySexism from their #FBRape campaign. By targeting advertisers, they were able to bring considerable pressure to bear on Facebook and were successful in forcing a change in policy on images that glorified violence against women. If this news greets you for the first time I recommend the founder's Independent article, The day the Everyday Sexism project won and Facebook changed its image. I also strongly recommend following @EverydaySexism on Twitter - especially if, like me, you thought sexism is no longer a problem.

They're releasing a book and the publisher is accepting submissions for the jacket design. The brief caught my eye:

"We're looking for a design that represents the thousands of women who are #shoutingback and we want you to help us create the perfect jacket to represent this movement and this exciting new extension of the project."

 I'm a literal minded sort of chap so I downloaded pictures of everyone (all genders) that follows @EverydaySexism and rearranged them so they resembled Laura Bates, the founder of the project. It's a large image. There are, after all, 52,000 profile pictures in it. Here's a zoomed in shot of Bates's left eye. Note the constituent profile pictures:

And here's the full image:

Why You Should Listen To EverydaySexism (TW)

(Trigger warning for discussion of trivialising of violence against women including one image.)

Regular readers of this blog are perhaps unduly familiar with word clouds, but as EverydaySexism and the #FBRape campaign are fresh topics to me I feel it best to recap for any potentially new readers. I've been following @EverydaySexism on Twitter for some time now and when I'm interested in finding out more about a Twitter account I like to look at the people who follow it. Working in IT lets me look a little closer than most and one thing I like to do is pull the Twitter biographies of all an account's followers and put them in a word cloud.

That's the image above. Words followers of @EverydaySexism use to describe themselves most frequently are the larger, words used infrequently are either small or absent. Click the image to see a bigger copy. It's fair to say that as well as attracting students and feminists the account has a significant number of writers and journalists invested in their efforts. Simon Pegg is a fan, as is Amanda Palmer. Caitlin Moran also follows. From the BBC alone you may recognise Rick Edwards, Jeremy Vine, Samira Ahmed, Mary Ann Sieghart, Sue Llewellyn, Jane Hill and Rhianna Dhillon as followers, and fans of the Guardian will recognise Laurie Penny, Spencer Ackerman, Emily Bell, Vicky Beeching, Lyn Gardner, Tim Dowling, Chris Roper, Sana Saleem, GrrlScientist, Claire Phipps and  Jane Martinson when they examine the list. I shan't bore you by listing every media outlet: suffice it to say the trend continues.

We should also not be too quick to dismiss the non journalist followers of EverydaySexism. Each of their 49,967 (and counting) followers averages 1,030 of their own followers, giving them an enviable social media reach. They seem almost uniquely poised to rapidly deliver their message to hundreds of thousands.

What do they want?