Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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centered around controversy mapping teaching, which resulted in the now obsolete server community Copenhagen Association for Digital Methods. We were both involved, together with Torben Elgaard Jensen and Mathieu Jacomy, when Mark Elam and Åsa Mäkitalo began an ambitious project to teach STS through controversy mapping in high schools in Gothenburg. A similar idea was pursued by the FORCCAST project under the direction of Dominique Boullier, and later of Nicolas Benvegnu and Thomas Tari, in collaboration with researchers from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the École de Mines, Télécom ParisTech and the Institutes of Complex Systems of the Île de France and Rhône-Alpes regions. In the same years, Tommaso was giving seminars on controversy mapping at the Politecnico di Milano and at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro with Fernanda Bruno and the team at her lab. As the network grew larger, so did the sense that we needed to write a book.
At the médialab, Tommaso had been working with Axel Meunier to develop the successor project to MACOSPOL. When EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science) received funding, it was an opportunity to not only teach controversy mapping but also to develop it as a proper research method and assess its ability to make a difference in the world beyond the classroom. Anders moved to Paris and for two years we were both working with Axel and many of the people mentioned above to show that we could map the controversy on climate adaptation in ways that actually mattered to its protagonists. EMAPS foregrounded the key role of data visualization in controversy mapping projects and cemented a burgeoning collaboration with the information designers at the Density Design lab in Milan. Today, it would be hard to imagine controversy mapping without a strong visual component and the contributions of people like Donato Ricci, Daniele Guido, Michele Mauri, Angeles Briones, Paolo Ciuccarelli, and their many dedicated students. Indeed, Federica Bardelli, to whom we owe immense gratitude as the designer of the illustrations in this book, is herself a product of Density Design and embodies the difference that the Milan crowd continues to make to the practice of controversy mapping.
When EMAPS ended in 2015, many of us took up new positions. Tommaso went first to the Digital Humanities Department of King’s College London to work with Tobias Blanke, Marc Coté, and Jennifer Pybus, and then to Lyon to collaborate with Pablo Jensen and further develop the technique of visual network analysis. Anders went back to Copenhagen to establish the Techno-Anthropology Lab together with Anders Koed Madsen, Andreas Birkbak, Torben Elgaard Jensen, and Morten Krogh Petersen. The group there, which was later joined by Mathieu Jacomy, Mette Simonsen Abildgaard, and Asger Gehrt Olesen, has provided an intellectual home base for much of the writing process. Together with the prodigious organizational talents of Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru, Tommaso devised the concept for the Public Data Lab which now convenes much of the old EMAPS group and a whole bunch of great new acquaintances in a fantastically engaging and interest-driven network, the activities of which have been another key intellectual anchor point and a place to spar on drafts and ideas throughout the past five years.
Some people have not found their way into the above narrative despite contributing ideas, providing feedback and in general being part of an ongoing conversation about controversy mapping: Kari De Pryck, David Moats, Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Francesca Musiani, Timothée Collignon, Ian Gray, Niranjan Sivakumar, Trevor Pinch, Thomas Turnbull, Vincent Lépinay, Oscar Coromina, Oscar Maldonado, Liam Heaphy, Massimiano Bucchi, Federico Neresini, Andrea Lorenzet, David Chavalarias, Eric Fleury, Marc Barbier, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, Tobias Bornakke, Jean-Paul Vanderlinden, Vivian Depoues, Didier Bigo, François Gemenne, and, not least, all our amazing students.
A special thanks goes to Marcella, Gilberto, Birgitte, and Ebbe, who taught us to be curious about complex things. And an even more special thanks to those who have been forced to witness the slow birth of the book up close, dealing with fallouts and frustrations, and doing their best to share our enthusiasm for a project that at times seemed never-ending: Kari, Mateo, Anne-Kirstine, and Gustav, who have patiently observed the entire writing process from the sideline, and Bertha, who was born into it. The manuscript was revised on a permanently open conference call while we were all working from home during the long months of COVID-induced lockdown in 2020. Only your indulgence made that possible.
We would also like to thank our editors at Polity Press, Stephanie Homer, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Mary Savigar, as well as the anonymous reviewers for taking this on, seeing it through, and making it so much better along the way. Thanks to Ian Tuttle, who revised the proofs of the book and corrected many of our mistakes. We are grateful to Giulia Marelli (Arnalda Gourmet), Gruppo Food, Craig Robinson, Nikolaos Askitas, Klaus Zimmermann, Vincent Traag, Thomas Franssen, Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz, Albert-Laszlo Barabási, Michel Callon, URBAN POWER, Lendager Group, John M. Eriksen, Ole Malling, Camilla Hiul Suppli, Niels Dalum Hansen, Mette Rasmussen, Palle Valentiner-Branth, Tyra Grove Krause, and Kåre Mølbak for giving us the permission to reproduce the images in this field guide.
And we would like to thank the institutions who have financially supported our work with the book: the Carlsberg Foundation, the Department of Learning & Culture at the University of Aalborg, Sciences Po Paris, the Digital Humanities Department of King’s College London, INRIA, and the CNRS.
Finally, there is one person whose contribution warrants its own section, namely Michael Flower, who has meticulously read and reread many consecutive versions of the manuscript, and provided not only constructive commentary and critique but incessant and unyielding support. Thanks, Michael: your encouragement has meant a lot to us.
Preface: The politics of association on display
Richard Rogers
As this book aptly demonstrates, there is a certain fit between Actor-Network Theory (ANT), controversy mapping, and digital methods. From the outset, digital methods were informed by ANT and sought to operationalize controversy mapping, for the purpose of investigating imbroglios such as the ones described in the book. They did so in at least three ways: putting actor association on display through link mapping, furnishing a coarse view of actor partisanship through mention mapping, and inserting the maps into the issue space, as they are part of it rather than only representations.
As Venturini and Munk discuss, associations are the main focus of ANT and the prime way in which controversies are fought and societal arrangements established. In order to put actor association on display, colleagues and I would capture how websites link to one another. Long before the industrialization, automation, and eventual decline of the hyperlink (in favor of the “like,” the “follower,” and very differently the “hashtag”), each link was hand-made by a webmaster, with particular proclivities or even policies. Linking was thus noncapricious and selective. Hyperlinking practices thus reminded us of the way in which scientists use references to mark their positioning in the academic field, but we extended these associational practices to a much larger and more diverse number of actors.
Once mapped, these links could be telling. One could profile and also typify the players in a public dispute beyond their usual roles, as outlined in the chapter about controversy actors. They could be profiled through the manner in which they linked and were linked to. Who does the actor link to? Why does the actor receive those particular inlinks? Which links could be regarded as conspicuously missing?
We found certain types and styles of association. There were aspirational links, with actors desiring association with another actor, often without reciprocation. There was cordial linking, where actors link to their affiliates and colleagues in the same space. There was critical linking, with actors pointing to culprits or addressees of an issue or problem. There were other types and styles, too, such as non-linking, self-linking, kinship linking, transdiscursive linking, and so forth.
Like Google, we also discovered that the sum of one’s inlinks is worth investigating, for it could be deployed as a reputational marker. But it also could deliver signs of where an actor’s sympathies lie. We wanted to enable the study of the politics of association, which, as argued over and again in this field guide, is a key task in controversy mapping.
Links may show alignments. They may reveal the company an actor keeps, or unlikely bedfellows. Particularly when displayed through the techniques described in the sections on visual