Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 29

Readers may have noticed that, apart from pointing out how contemporary controversies are related to science and technology and made public through media, we have so far abstained from providing a more precise definition. Controversy mapping is a pragmatic method. It cares less about separating what is controversial from what is not, and more about offering ways to study collective phenomena through the tensions that animate them. Anything in social life that cannot be settled by reference to matters of fact can in principle be described as a controversy and studied through controversy mapping (see, for example, Munk & Ellern, 2015). Any newspaper or scientific journal contains dozens of controversial topics and so do blogs and specialized websites, such as those of engineering associations or scientific societies. Wikipedia has several pages dedicated to controversial subjects, which list thousands of articles. It doesn’t really matter if the topic has already been mapped: controversies are fertile research objects that change across different contexts, evolve over time and can be charted in multiple ways.

However, the fact that almost any situation has a controversial angle does not mean that controversy mapping is equally suited to deal with all of them. In order to choose a good controversy to map, we suggest four criteria, illustrated in figure 9.