Several
’Mapping Controversies’ courses have been taught in Copenhagen for some time
now, at various places and with various titles. Earlier this week some of the
people involved in these efforts sat down for a one-day seminar to discuss
whether there is something under the umbrella of ’Mapping Controversies’ that
can be taken from an existence as pedagogical tools towards research
contributions (at this point I am using ’Mapping Controversies’ as a
placeholder for multiple activities instead of offering an authoritative
definition).
The seminar
was funded by the Digital Humanities Lab Denmark (DigHumLab) and hosted by the
Techno-Anthropology Research Group (TANT) at Aalborg University Copenhagen. For a
’Mapping Controversies’ teacher and practitioner such as myself, the seminar came
across as a rare chance to discuss among peers where our work might be heading.
Here follows an account of the discussions.
The day
started with Anders Kristian Munk’s keynote, which played with the idea of
treating Mapping Controversies as a patient that we could expose to a
collaborative medical examination. The metaphor was successful because it
invited Anders to think about the biography of the patient, starting with its
early Mertonian childhood in the 1950s, where it realized that the norms of
scientific communities were usefully exposed for study when they broke down
into controversies.
Then
followed the formative years of SSK and ANT in the 1970s and 80s, after which
the patient ’came into its own’ as a way to teach STS to engineering students.
This was soon followed by a severe midlife crisis, however, where the patient
started to get increasingly worried about democracy and the need to reestablish
the respect for what scientists do. The midlife crisis kick started a lively ’second
youth’ in the 2000s where the patient suddenly set out to fix both social
science and the broken public sphere with large EU-funded projects like
MACOSPOL and EMAPS.
While
noting Mapping Controversies’ new sense of mission and newfound ability to attract
other actors, Anders Munk’s patient metaphor of course implied that all is not
well. He gave two examples of cutting edge mapping controversies research, but largely
left it up to the other participants in the medical examination to suggest a
diagnosis and possible treatment. Four ’doctors’ took the lead here.
First,
Anders Blok noted how MC was doing well as a teaching tool, but not so well as
a method for basic social research. The treatment that fits this diagnosis, ’Dr
Blok’ argued, is to specify what exactly we do research on when we ’map
controversies’. He provided three alternatives, and then three reasons why he
preferred one of them. The first possible answer would be to say that mapping
controversies means to do research on techno-scientific controversies. The
problem is that this is not new. The second possible answer is that we do
mapping. But this just means that we are doing inquiry as all researchers are.
The third possible answer is to say we do research on digital methods, which
was Dr Blok’s recommended treatment. The advantages of rallying under ’digital
methods’ he mentioned included: 1) The chance to contribute to innovation in
research devices in social science, which seems to run on techniques developed
in the 1960s or earlier. 2) The chance to explicate the social life of methods,
to find new allies. 3) The chance to disentangle and rearrange the many partial
connections of mapping controversies in order to find a balance between
isolation and megalomania.
The
intervention by Blok brought up some discussion over where to position oneself
vis-a-vis the two schools of mapping controversies that have established
themselves most visibly: Amsterdam and Paris, or to be precise, Bruno Latour’s
médialab at Sciences Po and Richard Rogers’ Digital Methods Initiative at the
University of Amsterdam. Blok allowed himself the useful simplification of self-identifying
as an ’Amsterdamian’ to express an interest in ’digital grounding’. Digital
grounding is Rogers’ (2013) term, which is used to describe the idea that
digital findings do not necessarily have to be ’grounded’ in offline inquiry,
but could also be grounded in additional web data. For Dr Blok this was not so
much a claim he wished to make, but rather a good research question for
focusing on methods innovations: How does digital grounding work?
The
half-serious self-description as an ’Amsterdamian’ led Anders Kristian Munk to
intervene with the comment that one of the main interests in Amsterdam seems to
be media studies, something that there was general agreement was not the main
purpose for us. At this point it became clear that Blok’s self-description as
an Amsterdamian was a negative rather than a positive statement, serving to
avoid the Parisian school, where Mapping Controversies run the risk of posing
as some kind of heroic social science on digital steroids. As Blok put it, the
point would be to be able to stay in conversation both with media studies and
anthropology, engaging with a range of empirical objects and asking
methodological questions in the same tonality as elsewhere in social science,
such as investigating carefully what it means that digital data is often found
rather than made by researchers.
Next up was
Mark Elam, who built on Anders Munk’s reminder that there have been controversy
studies going on for a long time. With the recent interest in digital data, Dr
Elam warned, we run the risk of becoming picky in our choice of controversies:
It can be tempting to choose according to data availability. But this might not
lead to the most interesting controversies.
At the same
time, Dr Elam suggested that the patient was doing well on other frontiers. The
’coming crisis of empirical sociology’ argument (Savage and Burrows 2007) was
presented as having created a wave of interest that one might link up with in
efforts of ’retooling the sociological imagination’. This latter slogan was
well received in the room as a way to point to a middle ground of digital
methods craftsmanship, perhaps between the ’abstract empiricism’ of computational
social science and the ’grand theory’ of revolutionary claims about the
digital.
Dr Elam
also suggested that in addition to the work of C. Wright Mills, STS sensitivities
would be another ally for developing a craftsmanship that understands our own
methods as processes of technical mediation. This led on to a general
discussion on how STS also contributes with an idea of ’controversy as method’
in the sense of insisting on the non-stabilized and relational understanding of
our objects of study. One question that followed from this was how to make best
use of digital traces that exactly seem to offer more dynamic and unsettled
data than social science is used to.
The third
diagnosis and treatment was offered by Anders Koed Madsen who emphasized
Mapping Controversies as a specific mode of seeing that can bring emerging categories
to the front, challenge existing hypotheses, and explicate translation work and
the contingencies of invariants. Dr Koed’s suggested medication was thus based
on pragmatist perception theory.
This line
of thinking led to several observations, including Dr Koed’s own recent
experience that Mapping Controversies-inspired visualizations can work as
breaching experiments in organizations by offering them new ’modes of seeing’.
It was also noted that working in this way with visualizations that point out
contingencies and brings forward assumptions and disagreements might make it
hard to generalize to a ’larger public’, making the maps valuable mostly as
comparative resources.
One of the
comments that were made suggested that this way of thinking about mapping
controversies shifted focus from basic research to concrete interventions in
organizations, etc. Here, it might be important to keep trying to ask new
questions and not just raise key STS questions in new ways, although that
certainly also has value.
Another
issue that emerged here was that different disciplines bring different
epistemic interests into mapping controversies – from a sociologist’s interest
in social change, over a geographer’s interest in mapping, to an organization
studies interest in organizational norms.
The final
intervention was made by Torben Elgaard Jensen who started out by flattering
the patient that it worked well as a practical teaching device that did not
require large theoretical grounding. This was also a diagnosis, however, since
theoretical considerations might be lacking when the ambition becomes research
rather than teaching.
Dr Elgaard
Jensen challenged mapping controversies by presenting his recent attempts at
making scientometric and semantic mapping do work for him in a case study on
psychologists. He suggested that mapping might work as a device for falsifying
of troubling received ideas, in much the same way as STS has deployed anthropological
studies or historical studies to questions ideas such as the rationality of
science or the efficiency of technology. He argued that taking your own
medicine in this way has worked well with other patients, for instance the
field of European Ethnology (Munk & Elgaard Jensen, forthcoming). In the
early 20th century, ethnologists held a number of assumptions about
culture, but when they embarked on a systematic mapping of cultural elements,
it turned out that all of the initial assumptions were either wrong or
simplistic. This paved the way for the far more complex notion of culture,
which the ethnologists hold today. The way forward, Dr. Elgaard Jensen
suggested, is to find ideas in STS that one should be able to map, but which
might turn into similar productive disasters, when the actual mapping is
attempted. This brought forward discussions over the case study as the method
of choice in STS and how digital methods would tie in to this time-tested
approach, including the risk of producing maps as a quick-and-dirty way of
producing some grounding in a new and relatively unknown field.
After these
rich but also exhausting interventions and discussions, we took a breath of air
on the rooftop terrace at AAU-CPH, which fittingly enough offered a sweeping view
of Copenhagen, but also seemed to rest on quite fragile foundations, or at
least half-invisible ones.
The day
ended with the remaining doctors writing down their final diagnosis and
suggested treatment for the patient known as Mapping Controversies on small,
round pieces of cardboard (also known as paper plates). One diagnosis said
”Stress (Trying to do everything at once)” and came with the friendly advice
from the doctor to go ”easy on the networks and forget about democracy”.
Another doctor’s note echoed these ideas and added: ”Accept that you are a
mess. Use that productively”. I will leave you at this point to imagine what
some of the other diagnoses/treatments sounded like – and come up with your
own.
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