Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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1 I will follow the actors. I will not presume to know better than the people I am studying. I will learn from them what is relevant and important, what belongs to the controversy and what does not. I will not silence the voices I do not agree with or that I find off topic.
2 I will provide weighting. I will grant visibility to actors in a way that is proportional to the difference they make in the debate. I will not represent all viewpoints as equally important but take responsibility for weighting their influence and importance.
3 I will state my position. I will not pretend to be disinterested. I will not hide my opinion about the subject I am studying. I will make clear how my stakes in the debate influence how I explore and represent it.
4 I will stay with the trouble. I will not avoid the complexity of the controversy by means of methodological or theoretical shortcuts. I will not use my explanatory framework to take refuge from the incongruity and bewildering richness of social situations.
5 I will follow the medium. I will take advantage of the fact that controversies are made public, and thus mediated and recorded, by digital technologies. While investigating these records, I will also investigate the sociotechnical infrastructures that produce them and consider the specific ways in which they act upon the situation they mediate.
6 I will draw legible maps. In order to provide overview and facilitate navigation, maps are necessarily simplifications of the territory they represent. Making legible maps of sociotechnical debates is the only legitimate reason for reducing the complexity of a controversy. Yet, my simplification will be cautious, transparent, respectful, and leave others the possibility to reverse it.
7 I will open my inquiry to others. Whenever possible, I will make publicly available the data I collect, the code I develop, and the text and images I produce. I will share my investigation with the people that have stakes in it and invite them to participate.
The cartographer’s creed is easy to swear by, but difficult to live by, and it requires research methods that are up to the task. Controversies are especially resistant to the methodological simplification imposed by the conventional divide between qualitative and quantitative methods. This divide forces scholars to choose between delving into the details of the specific interactions of a local situation (say a secluded tribe, a routinized professional practice, or a domestic scene) or contemplating the aggregated signature of vast societal trends (say electoral dynamics, fluctuations of salaries and expenses, or surveys of opinion dynamics). Controversies do not resemble either.
This is why controversy mapping has increasingly been drawing on so-called digital methods (Rogers, 2013a) as a reaction to the digitization of public debate. Digital media have contributed to making controversies more visible, but they have also made them more traceable. Because of both their technical infrastructures and their business models, digital media are extremely efficient in tracing collective interactions (van Dijck, 2013). Most of their records, unfortunately, remain within the platforms that produce them, but some of them are made publicly available and can be repurposed for research. Digital records offer an opportunity for bypassing the divide between qualitative and quantitative research (Venturini & Latour, 2010; Munk, 2019). The idea that digital media can become the basis for a new generation of quali-quantitative research has been put forward by Bruno Latour (Latour, 2007; Latour et al., 2012) and implemented in the work of Richard Rogers (2013a), Noortje Marres (2017), and a growing number of scholars experimenting with the research affordances of digital records.
While digital methods offer exciting research opportunities and have a central place in this book, it is important to recognize that their use in controversy mapping has been informed by a research tradition that was built primarily on methods from ethnography and semiotics. As a first example of controversy mapping, we will therefore draw on one instance of such research.
The elephant in the room
On April 4 and 5, 1995, the Serena Lodge of the Amboseli National Park in Kenya hosted a two-day stakeholder workshop for the administrators and personnel of the park, the indigenous Maasai communities, local and foreign ecologists, tour operators, local journalists and policymakers, as well as national and international donors. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the fate of the local elephant population and, in particular, the possibility of reducing their numbers in the park. Raising questions about the preservation of a landmark African species and about land management in postcolonial Africa, the workshop was predictably controversial and, in many ways, typical of public debates about science and technology. Charis Thompson’s case study of the Amboseli elephants and their many stakeholders (Thompson, 2002; see also Denayer, 2013) thus provides a first example of the kind of terrain that controversy mappers are trying to chart.
What? From knowledge claims to debates
Statement one: “Elephants are a keystone species whose density is crucial to keep the Kenyan ecosystems in balance. The right concentration of elephants sustains biodiversity in the savannah, where their grazing removes shrubs and keeps the plains open for other species, and in the forest, where it creates clearings and favors revegetation. However, an excessive concentration of elephants, such as the one observed in Amboseli, can lead to the disappearance of woodland and eventually to a decline in biodiversity.”
Statement two: “The African elephant is a species of exceptional conservation value. Not only are the animals majestic and unique, they are also highly intelligent and capable of sophisticated matriarchal social systems. Furthermore, the Amboseli elephants have been studied for over 20 years, which has allowed scientists to accumulate the necessary knowledge to sustain a research program on these animals and their collective organization.”
Considered in isolation, neither of the statements above are controversial. Both are empirically sound, logically coherent and generally accepted by Amboseli stakeholders. The controversy, however, becomes immediately visible when the statements are read together as two opposing arguments in an ongoing conversation about wildlife management. The first suggests that, in order to enhance the biodiversity of the region, some elephants should be pushed out of the park (where their concentration is too high) to the neighboring areas (where their concentration is too low). The second maintains that elephants, because of their unique social lives, should have priority over other ecological considerations and should be allowed to remain in the park where they could be more safely protected from poaching and other threats. The first movement of controversy mapping, therefore, is to make visible how expert knowledge is never valid in itself, but always in relation to a series of claims which support or oppose each other.
The tree of disagreements shown in figure 1 allows us to visualize the battle lines of the controversy, which are sometimes unique and relatively clear (as in the Amboseli controversy) and other times multiple and fractured. It also allows us to appreciate the way in which knowledge claims are never simple statements of fact, but attempts to prescribe how a situation should be handled. The first statement above is not only an observation on how elephants interact with their environment, it is also a “speech act” (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) meant to curb the numbers of Amboseli elephants, by encouraging them to migrate from the park. Likewise, the second statement is not a generic praise of elephants; it is a specific plea for protecting Amboseli’s elephant population within the established structures of the national park. In sociotechnical controversies, statements are always connected in arguments and arguments are always set forth as proposals for action. In controversies, knowledge is always enmeshed with politics.
Figure 1 Tree