Controversy Mapping

Оглавление

Tommaso Venturini. Controversy Mapping

CONTENTS

Guide

List of Illustrations

Pages

Dedication

Controversy Mapping. A Field Guide

Acknowledgments

Preface: The politics of association on display

Introduction

Controversies between technoscience and mediatized democracy

Controversy mapping between Actor-Network Theory and digital methods

The elephant in the room

What? From knowledge claims to debates

Who? From debates to actors

How? From actors to networks

Where? From networks to worldviews

When? From worldviews to change

What controversy mapping is not

A peek into the table of contents

1Why map controversies?

Accepting complicity as a mapmaker

Taking controversies seriously

Mapping as a way to study science and technology in the making

Mapping as a method for design and innovation

Mapping for democratic inquiry

Choosing a good controversy

Binary and multiple controversies

Cold and hot controversies

Commonplace and specialized controversies

Secret and accessible controversies

On the risk of being overwhelmed

2A proliferation of issues

Types of issues and sources of disagreement

Organized skepticism

Paradigmatic shifts

Priority disputes

Institutional struggles

Experimenter’s regress

Laboratory warfare

Skirmishes at the border of technoscience

Contested expertise

Path dependence and the social construction of technology

Large technological systems

Ontological politics

3Making room for more actors

Bureaucrats and policymakers

Experts and lay experts

Scientific campaigners and professional skeptics

Scientific entrepreneurs

Non-human actors

The birth of Actor-Network Theory

The voice of the voiceless

4Exploring controversies as actor-networks

Following actions with ethnography

Experiencing

Enquiring

Examining

Sorting observations with semiotics

Making lists, taking names

Staging characters

ANT as an anti-theory

Four ways of observing collective actions

Acting as assembling

Acting as aligning

Acting as redirecting

Acting as being

The truth of relation

The problem of reification

The problem of exclusivity

5Exploring controversies with digital methods

The quest for quali-quantitative methods

Lessons from scientometrics

Digital methods beyond virtual research and computational social science

Digital media and the attention economy

The amplification and acceleration of public debate

6Collecting and curating digital records

Follow the medium!

Querying

Scraping

Crawling

Curating

7Visual network analysis

Visual network analysis in practice

Structural holes, clusters, and sub-clusters

Centers and bridges

Node ranking

Node typology

Turning relational structures into visual patterns

Exploratory data analysis and visual methods

The magmatic nature of relational phenomena

Networks are not actor-networks

The heterogeneity of nodes and edges

The reversibility of actor-networks

The dynamics of relational change

8Representing controversies

Maps as descriptions

Maps as spaces for commensuration

Maps as instruments of power

Second-degree objectivity

Objectivity by abstention

Landscape objectivity

Talk-show objectivity

Relational objectivity

Controversy atlases

Narration and exploration

Datascape navigation

9Mapmaking as a form of intervention

Hybrid forums and parliaments of things

Controversy mapping as an open-air experiment

Data sprints

Critical proximity

Controversy mapping in the shadow of Gaia

The end of Nature

Learning from Penelope

A conversation with Bruno Latour “A mix or maybe a mess of ideas”

“Every philosophy of science concept is in fact a simplification of a data structure”

“The word controversy has always been controversial”

“We believed we would have Tarde, and we got fake news”

“The temporal aspect of fact making”

“Here is a new task for controversy mapping”

References

Index. A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

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To our teachers and our students

Several initiatives were taken in those years to consolidate the ongoing experiments with controversy mapping. One was the curation of a collection of websites that students around the world were producing as part of their coursework, another was the FORCCAST project (FORmation par la Cartographie des Controverses à l’Analyse des Sciences et des Techniques) which had been launched in France to establish a research-based understanding of the pedagogy of controversy mapping. What was missing, we thought, was a book. Tommaso had compiled his teaching materials into a portfolio which became the first draft for a manuscript that has since developed and transformed through more iterations than we would care to think of. We are proud to see it emerge now as a fully-fledged field guide to controversy mapping, not just for teaching, but also for research and democratic inquiry. This would not have been possible without the help and support of an ever-expanding and highly committed network of fellow controversy mappers that we want to credit and thank.

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The combined threat of settlements and poachers had two consequences. It almost halved the population of elephants in the area and pushed the survivors to stop migrating and take refuge in the center of the newly established national park. It also encouraged the emergence of a wide international mobilization for the defense of wildlife and of elephants in particular. David Western and Cynthia Moss were solid allies in this fight, the first through his work in the field of nature conservation, the second with her internationally acclaimed accounts of elephant life (originally commissioned by Western himself). In 1974, this mobilization led to the establishment of Amboseli National Park itself and in 1989 to an international ban on the ivory trade.

In the 1980s, the success of the wildlife protection policies had led to a fivefold increase in the density of the elephants in Amboseli, effecting, according to some observers, a severe loss of woodland and biodiversity. The link between elephants and deforestation had been a matter of controversy for a long time. In the 1970s, Western himself had opposed this link, blaming instead the excessive salinity of water from Mount Kilimanjaro. In the 1980s, however, the results of the electric fence experiments convinced Western that resuming the elephants’ migration was necessary to safeguard biodiversity. Accordingly, he asked the Wildlife Service to open a discussion on the overconcentration of elephants but was refused several times because of stiff opposition from the ethologists and the international sponsors of the park.

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