Statistician

Definition: A person who formulates and analyzes statistics or a collection of statistics. In protest analysis, this is a person who lists out the numbers, the dates, and/or the methods of a protest. They don't look at the protest in a holistic vantage point.

Example: Historians chart the statistics of the proportions of families that love below the poverty line and compare the national average of all Americans below the line to the average of African Americans below the line. The institution reported these data to convey the amount of inequality over the span of the Civil Rights movement(s).

A bar graph comparing All Americans below the poverty line and African Americans below the poverty line

Image Credit: Mintz, Steven. "The Civil Rights Revolution: Interpreting Statistics." The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. 29 July 2013. 


From the text:
"The general method of presenting material, I believe, should be that of the literary historian  rather than that of the statistician" (13).  Griffin is explaining his position about which type of modality one should be thinking when approaching analysis of protest. "That is, we should strive for movement studies which will preserve the idiom in which the movement was actually expressed" (13).  The problem with protest analysis is the lack of meaning behind the words of a movement. However, sometimes people are less responsive with words, they respond better with numbers. Griffin believes in the words. The only role a statistician plays in protest analysis is to showcase a more logical appeal - if that's what is necessary.

Works Cited: 
Griffin, Leland (1952). "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements." Theoretical Foundations and New Directions.