Presentation by Jean Burgess and Theresa Sauter at the Emerging Challenges in Digital Media Research seminar, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology

1. Studying Networked Publics
through Social Media and
Controversy Mapping
Associate Professor Jean Burgess
Dr Theresa Sauter

2. NETWORKED PUBLICS AND THEIR ISSUES
WHY PUBLICS?
•
American pragmatists: Dewey (The Public and Its Problems, 1927) and
Lippman (The Phantom Public, 1927)
 “Issues spark a public into being” (Marres, 2005)
WHY NETWORKS?
•
•
Latour: „an actor is nothing but a network‟ and „a network is nothing but its
actors‟ (2011: 800)
ANT – Tracing material and semiotic relations of heterogeneous elements to
see how they shape one another.
WHY ISSUES?
•
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„Hot situations‟ (Callon, 1998); „matters of concern‟ (Latour, 2003);
„experimental events‟ (Stengers, 2005)
Tracing „an assemblage of actors jointly implicated in an issue … as a way
of finding out whether and how issue-networks may organize publics‟
(Marres and Rogers, 2005: 929).

3. DIGITAL METHODS
THE DIGITAL
• More data, more information, more experts, more issues.
• The „expansion of digitality‟ (Latour 2011: 802) - increased
complexity and new solutions.
SOCIAL MEDIA
• „Lively data‟ (Savage, 2013: 4)
• New voices, new publics, new issues, new tools.
DIGITAL METHODS
• „Reassembling social science methods‟ (Ruppert et al., 2013)
• „Restructuring the study of social existence‟ (Rogers, 2004)
• Unite qual and quant, micro and macro, structure vs. agency

4. CONTROVERSY MAPPING
•
Exploring and visualising the complexities of a debate around a
contentious public issue.
• ANT and STS
CONTROVERSIES
• relational, dynamic, democratic, productive.
• provide insights into the dimensions of a social phenomenon.
• Controversies uncover “the state of an issue and the state of its
public” (Marres and Rogers, 2005: 928), and generate opportunities for
new knowledge production.
MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies on Science for POLitics)
• To combine „the best research in science, technology and society‟ and
“the best research on web-based tools‟ to build a „web-based platform
to help the exploration and mapping of scientific controversies‟
(mappingcontroversies.net)

5. CONNECTING SOCIAL MEDIA
• Everyday experience &
popular culture
• Role of emotion and affect
• Proliferation of
voices, objects, actors
• Proxy access to media
ecology around existing
debates
• Early identification of
controversies

6. ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

8. ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
#vape

9. ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

10. HASHTAG AS HYBRID FORUM
#agchatoz
@replies
Jul-Oct 2013

11. CONTRIBUTIONS & CHALLENGES
• Existing methods: Identification and exploration of issues and
associated controversies
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Levels of activity
Identification of themes, discourses
Actors and their relationships
Key media resources and websites
Accounting for the materiality of platforms
• Methodological challenges:
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Issue boundary & data access
Misbehaving publics
„Quanti-quali‟/data-driven ethnographic approaches
Visualisation, public communication & intervention