Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini

Station Landing

      Suite 300

      Medford, MA 02155, USA

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4452-3

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Venturini, Tommaso, author. | Munk, Anders Kristian, 1980- author.

      Title: Controversy mapping : a field guide / Tommaso Venturini and Anders Kristian Munk.

      Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The first student-friendly textbook on the exciting field of controversy mapping” -- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2021003318 (print) | LCCN 2021003319 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509544509 | ISBN 9781509544516 (pb) | ISBN 9781509544523 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Controversy mapping. | Sociology--Graphic methods. | Social conflict--Data processing.

      Classification: LCC HM1112 .V46 2021 (print) | LCC HM1112 (ebook) | DDC 303.4-dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003318 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003319

      The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

      For further information on Polity, visit our website:

      politybooks.com

Acknowledgments

      It was in Paris, in the fall of 2013, that Tommaso first suggested the idea for this book. Anders had begun a two-year stint as a visiting researcher at the Sciences Po médialab, where Tommaso was the research coordinator, and we had both been teaching controversy mapping for some years. At the time, no explicit guidance was available and the pedagogy of controversy mapping was learned by trying, possibly through apprenticeship with colleagues ahead of the curve. The atmosphere was playful and experimental with a high level of engagement and substantial contributions from the students, yet the need was felt to compile the teaching resources that we were all working on into more structured formats.

      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.

Controversy mapping has existed as a pedagogic practice in Science and Technology Studies (STS) since the early 1990s, and Bruno Latour has played a pivotal role all the way from its inception at a time when mapping projects were still handed in on paper through to its later digital adaptations. He is also the reason why the authors of this book first met and we can safely say that it would not have been written without him. We first got in touch more than a decade ago while working at different ends of Bruno’s MACOSPOL project (MApping COntroversies in Science for POLitics – the first large-scale research project dedicated to the approach). Anders was teaching controversy mapping on the MSc program in Nature, Society, and Environmental Politics at the University of Oxford, which was one of five test beds, while Tommaso was working on the digital part of the project and himself teaching controversy mapping at SciencesPo (the three remaining test beds were MIT, the EPFL – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the École des Mines). From that early collaboration we were able to take inspiration from the vanguard of controversy analysis in STS, including Andrew Barry, Sarah Whatmore, Valerie November, Albena Yaneva, who went on to write the first book on controversy mapping in architecture (Yaneva, 2011), and not least Noortje Marres, who was already a leading figure in digital methods and has since published a seminal book on digital sociology (Marres, 2017) and established one of the key research groups in the field at the University of Warwick.

      Noortje’s role is particularly interesting because she embodies the crosspollination that went on in the early 2000s between Richard Rogers and his Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) in Amsterdam, and Bruno Latour and his STS group in Paris. As a doctoral student in both places, her work was the first real example of what could happen at the interface between actor-network theory and new digital methods for studying issues online. As junior researchers at the time, we took inspiration from her example. Indeed, digital methods would be as impossible to imagine without Richard and Noortje as controversy mapping would be without Bruno. Richard’s books on digital methods are already classics (Rogers, 2013a, 2019). The summer and winter schools convened by his team in Amsterdam (Esther Weltevrede, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sanchez Querubin, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Fernando van der Vlist, Sabine Niederer, Marc Tuters, to name a few) have become the go-to place for a generation of young social cartographers. Arguably, the game-changing role of the DMI came about through its early focus on toolmaking. Building research instruments to repurpose digital records and reflecting on the implication of such an operation, people like Erik Borra and Bernhard Rieder have enabled controversy mappers to develop their craft in critical proximity to its more technical sides. This cannot be acknowledged enough and deserves far more credit than is typically allotted.

A similar story can be told about the Sciences Po médialab which was, when we first met, coming into its own as a hub for digital methods toolmaking. Bruno had made it a precondition for his move from the École des Mines to Sciences Po Paris that he could set up a lab with research engineers capable of developing new tools for quali-quantitative research. Many of these engineers came from Franck Ghitalla’s group at the University of Compiègne and brought with them a focus on visual network analysis. Mathieu Jacomy, in particular, has become a very close collaborator and an invaluable sparring partner for both of us. He was also the initiator of the Gephi software which has become synonymous with visual network exploration for everyone in digital methods and quite a few people beyond. In general, the importance of the médialab for our formation as controversy mappers cannot be overstated, to a large extent thanks to the unique atmosphere created by and around toolmakers like Paul Girard, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Daniele Guido, Guillaume Plique, Alexis Jacomy, Audrey Banneyx, and Jean-Philippe Cointet.

      After MACOSPOL came a period of expansion. Anders went back to Copenhagen to set up the first Danish controversy mapping course with Torben Elgaard Jensen at the Danish Technical University. That same year, in 2010, Anders Blok, Martin Skrydstrup, and Ayo Wahlberg started a similar course at the University of Copenhagen, followed a couple of years later by a course at the Danish IT University run by Britt Ross Winthereik and Michael Hockenhull, and a course in Aarhus run by Peter Danholt and Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen. There was now a basis