Web-Visions as Controversy-Lenses

Abstract

Web-based visualizations are increasingly used to study and manage emerging technologies and the controversies they ignite. The first part of this paper provides a methodological review of this trend and presents a typology that organizes influential analytical approaches according to the data they use to generate visualizations; the ontology they ascribe to them and their proposed function. The second part presents 'web-vision analysis' as an analytical approach that has roots in different aspects of the reviewed approaches but nonetheless distinguishes itself in two ways. First, it translates the concepts of 'calculative spaces' and 'attention-structures' from economic sociology into controversy-visualization. Second, it constructs visualizations on the basis of case-study logics. The third part illustrates how this approach ultimately leads to distinct empirical choices by reflecting on the process of constructing and interpreting web-visions of synthetic biology made

Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method

“…Digital methods of controversy analysis are potentially biased because the instruments they deploy to describe controversy—search engines and social media platforms—exert a notable influence on the enactment of controversy online ( Madsen 2012 ), which places serious limits on the generalizability of the insights of digital controversy analysis. Digital bias threatens to undermine controversy analysis because we cannot be sure that we are analyzing the controversies themselves, rather than the digital settings that render these controversies analyzable ( Venturini and Guido 2012 ).…”

Experiments with a data-public: Moving digital methods into critical proximity with political practice

“…Such questions have more prominence in recent calls to think of digital methods as ''web-visions'' (Madsen, 2012(Madsen, , 2015a or ''interface methods'' (Marres and Gerlitz, 2016) that inevitably involve some redistribution of research design to, for instance, commercial platforms like Facebook. This means that overlaps between the logics of such platforms and the analysts normative assumptions about the public must be scrutinized anew in every project.…”

“…The past 15 years have seen increasing attention paid to the ways in which public debates can be visualized through the digital traces they leave online (Latour et al, 2012;Madsen, 2012;Marres and Moats, 2015;Marres and Rogers, 2008;Munk, 2014;Rogers and Marres, 2000;Venturini, 2012). While most of this work on digital ''issue mapping'' (Marres, 2015) or ''controversy mapping'' (Venturini, 2012) has focused on the collection and analysis of online discussions-using web data to get an overview of what actors say and do in what Michel Callon (1998) has called ''hot situations''-less energy has so far been devoted to the hopes and ambitions invested in the analysis and visualization of ''issue publics'' (Marres, 2005) by their implicated parties.…”

Beyond the Bubble: Three empirical reasons for re-conceptualizing online visibility

“…Most importantly, a web-vision is taken to be a result of a set of selection mechanisms that is distributed beyond the algorithm (Madsen, 2012). Th e concept is inspired by recent work (Rogers, 2013;Marres, 2012;Mager, 2012) that clashes with the idea of thinking about the SERP as a privileged empirical site where the infl uence of the users ends and the technology begins to shape their attention.…”

“…Other frameworks, however, have suggested a need for a theoretical focus that goes beyond the algorithm and the SERP to explain online visibility. One suggestion along this line of reasoning is to see Google as giving rise to 'web-visions' that perform the world on the basis of a distributed chain of socio-technical selection mechanisms (Madsen, 2012).…”