Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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provides some methodological guidance on how to choose and delimit a controversy so that it can feasibly be mapped.
Chapter 2, A proliferation of issues, begins to unravel the complexity of sociotechnical disputes by introducing a series of examples derived from the literature in Science and Technology Studies and relevant for the exploration of controversies. The catalog we develop includes a variety of issues found within the academic community (organized skepticism; paradigmatic shifts; disputes over academic conventions and scholarly authority; clashes between theoretical and experimental knowledge) and beyond it (through the alliances and oppositions built by laboratory work; questions about public engagement and legitimate expertise; the social consequences of technological innovations; and their ontological multiplicity).
Chapter 3, Making room for more actors, presents some of the typical characters in the cast of sociotechnical controversies and helps you recognize them and appreciate their role. After a brief recollection of the usual protagonists of political debates (decision makers, regulators, activists), the chapter moves on to consider the actors that are more specific to sociotechnical debates. Moving from the center to the periphery of technoscience, it describes the role played by scientists and engineers, experts and lay experts, citizens and citizen-scientists, scientific campaigners and professional skeptics. But the heterogeneity of sociotechnical controversies goes further. Defying the classical distinctions of social theory (but also the separation between social and natural sciences, humanities, and engineering), controversies mobilize all sorts of non-human actors. The second half of the chapter thus discusses the importance of actors such as scientific devices and technological innovations.
We then move to present the main methodological techniques employed by controversy mapping. Chapter 4, Exploring controversies as actor-networks, provides a hands-on introduction to Actor-Network Theory, in many ways the theoretical and methodological foundation of controversy mapping. The chapter provides practical instructions drawn from ANT’s peculiar way of looking at collective action as well as the way in which its founders have imported and adapted techniques from ethnography and semiotics.
Chapter 5, Exploring controversies with digital methods, retraces the quest for qualiquantitative methods first through scientometrics and then through digital methods. It argues that, because of the increasing diversity of records that they produce, digital media are not only a new object of study, but also an occasion to renew practices of social research. The chapter acknowledges the potential of records that are both intensive (in the details they offer) and extensive (in their spatial and temporal coverage), but also discusses the risk of naturalizing them and neglecting their multiple biases.
Diving into the details of the digital methods research chain, chapter 6, Collecting and curating digital records, demonstrates how electronic records can be collected by querying search engines, scraping information from structured documents, and crawling the Web. The chapter concludes by considering how digital inscriptions can be transformed into a corpus for social research through a process of cleaning and enriching.
Chapter 7 focuses on Visual network analysis, an original technique for translating relational patterns into visual features. This technique is particularly suited for controversy mapping because it implements in practice a key idea from Actor-Network Theory: the importance of being sensitive to differences in the density of associations between a variety of heterogeneous actors. The chapter discusses the conceptual implications of this method and provides a detailed presentation of its techniques.
Chapter 8, Representing controversies, discusses how to visualize the results of a controversy mapping project. It first addresses this question from a conceptual point of view, drawing a comparison between controversy mapping and geographical cartography. The chapter proceeds to consider the notion of second-degree objectivity, that is to say the way in which controversy mapping tries to present multiple viewpoints but also to weigh them according to their relevance and importance. Finally, it provides practical guidance on the production of a controversy atlas as a vehicle for story-telling and exploration.
Chapter 9, Mapmaking as a form of intervention, situates controversy mapping amongst other forms of public engagement and discusses its radical openness to different types of actors and its commitment to doing inquiry in collaboration with its publics. To organize this co-construction, we suggest the use of data sprints: a research format we developed to mobilize different controversy stakeholders as part of the mapmaking process.
The conclusion acknowledges that controversy mapping comes with a distinctive political goal. As the globalization facilitated by modern technoscience proves itself more and more environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust, public opinion is increasingly tempted to match this extreme challenge with extreme political solutions. Against this temptation, this book is a call for reinvigorating democratic institutions.
Each chapter is introduced by a vignette presenting an example from a controversy that we have previously mapped, and illustrating the ideas discussed in the chapter. Like any other field guide, the book can be read from the comfort of your armchair (savoring your next journey in the perilous but fascinating realm of technoscientific controversies), but it is more useful as a travel companion. Put it in your backpack and set out for the exploration of a controversy you care about. If this guide heightens your attention to the landscape you travel and opens your mind to the encounters that await you, it will have achieved half its objectives. If it also helps you to draw up a sketch of the terrain that is useful to others, it will have succeeded in the other half. Bon voyage.
1 Why map controversies?
In this chapter, we learn about controversies as a way to study science in society, design better technological solutions or promote democratic inquiry, but also why controversies can be hard to navigate and why mapmaking is never neutral.
Controversies tend to get cartographers caught up in their mess. This can be both awkward and laborious, and it raises the question of why one should engage with controversy mapping in the first place. If you already align with a specific viewpoint, mapping a controversy can seem like a waste of time. If you know who is right and who is wrong, why bother considering the other positions? If all you want is to tip a scale, there are more efficient ways to do it than through mapmaking. But even if you genuinely want to help actors find their way around the debate, you will find that mapping is always in the interest of some and to the detriment of others.
By treating controversies as “generative events” (Whatmore, 2009), i.e. not as problems that need fixing but as occasions to investigate public debate when the social fabric is under transformation, controversy mapping highlights their troubles rather than explaining them away. This attention is not always welcomed and the very act of calling something a controversy can itself be controversial. Indeed, making the complexity of a controversy manifest can run directly contrary to the agenda of those who rely on simplification to make their point. No matter how hard you try to be impartial, in a controversy you are either complicit or irrelevant. To become a mapmaker is to accept complicity. The question, then, is not how to keep your hands clean, but why get them dirty?
In 2013, we were working on a research project exploring the use of Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science (EMAPS) around climate change (Venturini et al., 2014b). One of the issues we worked with was vulnerability indexes, i.e. ways of measuring countries’ exposure to climate change impacts and thus decide the distribution of