Visualising Erowid

Erowid is an online platform that provides information on a wide range of psychoactive substances, combining scientific resources with a large archive of user-submitted experience reports. These texts describe how substances are used, perceived, and interpreted by users, forming a substantial body of informal and experiential knowledge. As such, Erowid represents a unique site to study how information about drugs circulates through online communities, outside institutional and biomedical frameworks.

Visualising Erowid is a digital research project that explores this corpus in order to understand how experiences are shared and how patterns of use emerge. By focusing on a subset of substances, the project examines how language, dosage, co-use, and user demographics contribute to the construction of this distributed knowledge.