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This introduction provides an overview of material-or device-centered approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four articles that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucaldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement -perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects -we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the articles in this special section, namely their focus on 1) mundane technologies, 2) experimental devices and settings for material participation; 3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and 4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society (STS) and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter.

New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here “landscapes” a debate by displaying key “webby” relationships between organizations. “Debate-scaping” plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperlinking as well as their discursive affinities. The underlying claim is that hyperlinking and discursive maps provide a semblance of given socio-epistemic networks on the web. The climate change debate on the web in November 1998 serves as a test case. Three findings are reported. First, distinctive .com, .gov and .org linking styles were found. Second, organizations take care in making hyperlinks, leading to the premise that the hyperlinks (and the “missing links”) reveal which issue and debate framings organizations acknowledge, and find acceptable and unacceptable. Finally, it was learned that organizations take substantive positions and address other organizations' positions. Thus, we found the makings of a “debate” that may be mapped. Scenarios of use to support new public participation techniques and experiments are discussed by way of conclusion.

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called 'interface methods'. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research -thinking methods as 'interface methods' -and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or 'digital analytics' opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific 'interface method', namely co-occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize 'issue dynamics' in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of 'interface methods': digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with it, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, in redistributions of social methods currently ongoing in online environments.

This paper explores the `issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however, fully answer the question of why issue formation should be appreciated as a crucial dimension of democratic politics. To address this question, I turn to the work of two early 20th-century American pragmatists: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. In their work on democracy in industrial society, they conceived of public involvement in politics as being occasioned by, and providing a way to settle, controversies that existing institutions were unable to resolve. Moreover, Dewey developed a `socio-ontological' understanding of issues, which suggests that people's involvement in politics is mediated by problems that affect them. Dewey and Lippmann thus provide important argumentative resources for further elaborating the approach to public involvement developed in STS. STS research has also developed a `socio-ontological' approach, as it focuses on the `attachments' that people mobilize (and that mobilize people) in the performance of their concern with public affairs. Such an approach provides an alternative to discursivist analysis of the role of `issue framing' in the involvement of publics in politics.

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a 'medium-specific' technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to restructure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce 'alien' methodological assumptions into social research (such as an preoccupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with 'external' analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a 'problem' with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of 'real-time' social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of 'austerity'. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?). Keywords economic instability.' 1 The Wall Street Journal chose to foreground the social angle, telling the story of a participant in online discussions on bipolar disorder, who found that his contributions had been scraped by a pharmaceutical company, or more precisely, a marketing firm working for a pharmaceutical company. "The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives." 2 In this article, too, we want to explore the capacity of scraping to transform social research and to reconfigure the relations between subjects, objects, methods and devices of social research. However, rather than focusing on the 'human angle' foregrounded in the Wall Street Journal, or adopting the grand epistemological perspective of the New York Times, we want to focus on the device of scraping itself, and examine what kinds of social research practices it enables. Adopting such an approach enables us to examine digital social research from t...