A controversy is a situation where the actors agree to disagree. Not only that, but they also tend to disagree on the nature of their disagreement.
Think about GMOs, climate adaptation, hydraulic fracking, or COVID mitigation measures. These issues suffer from a fundamental lack of consensus on what should count as the important questions and who should be trusted as the authoritative experts. You cannot reduce them to well-defined scientific, technological, ethical, or legal problems without effectively taking sides in them. Contending, for example, that the genetic modification of food crops is a question of feeding the world’s growing population, and that such a question is best answered by a resource economist, opens up very different avenues of action and caters to very different political rationales than, say, arguing that it is a question of biodiversity, which should be answered by an ecologist, or a question of patent law and property rights, which should be answered by a legal expert. In controversies, such definitions are de facto acts of partisanship.
Contrary to simpler forms of misunderstanding and dispute, controversies are not easily settled by explaining the facts, improving communication, or striking a deal.

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Some of these protesters defend a certain framing of the controversy (fracking = climate change). Others defend a different framing of the same controversy (fracking = violation of indigenous rights)

A good way to think about it is to say that actors in controversies are always engaged in a struggle for relevance. What matters is to have their particular experiences acknowledged and their particular forms of testimony and documentation admitted as evidence in the discussion. This is why actors typically put a lot of energy into trying to define the boundaries and parameters of a controversy and police what belongs to the discussion and what does not. In controversies, knowledge claims immediately become political as it is clear to the actors that they have a stake in the way such claims are being made.
As a controversy mapper, your job is not to settle the discussion by imposing your definition of ‘what this is basically about’ or by privileging one type of expertise that you consider more relevant or trustworthy over another. This would make you a party to the discussion and this is not what we want from you on this course. At least not to begin with. What we ask you to do instead is to be cartographers. You will learn how to make maps that deploy the controversy in its complexity and make it possible to explore the different positions without having to choose between them or make up your mind about them right away.

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"Issue Resonance in the climate-change Twitter space", Digital Methods Initiative (link). The circles represent hashtags, and they are placed closer when the tweets using them have a similar content (in a corpus dedicated to climate change). The visual groups, labelled in the image, correspond to different topics.

Controversy analysis has a long tradition in STS, most of it in a time when digital traces were not available. It is still entirely both possible and relevant to practice controversy mapping offline and by more qualitative/ethnographic means. The digital turn in controversy mapping does, however, provide new opportunities. Most controversies today have an online presence; different online media technologies affect how controversies play out; digital traces are a convenient way to get an overview of what many actors are doing; and maps based on digital traces can complement ethnographic inquiries.

This is a 5 ECTS course that runs as 2 full weeks of lectures and workshops, exams not included. The course requires a significant amount of practical work. In the first week, we master the use of various digital tools and techniques; in the second week, you apply them to your cases and produce a controversy atlas. It is crucially important that you are able to take an active part in this.

We will be working with methods that involve a considerable element of practical craftsmanship and the scheduled workshops, assignments and tutorials are your best chance of getting to grips with them. It is a question of learning by doing. 

Activity workload In hours

COURSE SESSIONS 40

TUTORIALS, GROUP WORK, EXAM 35

READING 62.5

TOTAL 137.5 hours

There will be a virtual class with lectures on the Monday of both weeks.

In the first week, there will be physical classes with lectures and workshops Tuesdays and Fridays both weeks, and tutorials to complete in groups with supervision from our teaching assistants on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

In the second week, there will be physical classes with lectures and supervision on Tuesdays and Fridays, and group work on your controversy atlas on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The physical classroom will also be available for group work when there are no lectures.

The first week is called boot camp because it takes you through the drill of doing a digital controversy mapping project from start to finish. We will use Wikipedia as our main testbed. This is a sandbox environment that allows us to follow the same methodological steps, use the same techniques, consider the same methodological problems related to the same media environments, and so forth. It does not mean that Wikipedia will be the best place for all (if any) of you to map controversies in relation to your cases and projects, but it is a good place to learn. You can branch out to other platforms on your own.

The goal of the boot camp is to gather the know-how you will need to map your own controversy. You will have to describe the steps you will take. To do that, you have to be able to explain how you will gather data, how you will analyze and visualize it, and what you expect to get out of it. We will refer to this as your digital methods protocol.

The second week is called sprint week because you work intensively and independently on your own controversy mapping projects. You will follow the digital methods protocol that you designed. You will produce relevant visualizations and narrate a story around them. This will comprise your controversy atlas. We will also talk about how controversy mapping can interface with other methods, practice quali-quantitative analysis, and discuss the theoretical foundations and ambitions of controversy mapping. 

The goal of sprint week is to gather and explore your data, visualize it and turn it into a narrated atlas with a clear storyline. This atlas is the final project that you will submit for examination.