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Sebastian Kubitschko, Anne Kaun (Eds.) - Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research-Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
Sebastian Kubitschko, Anne Kaun (Eds.) - Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research-Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
Methods
in Media and
Communication Research
Edited by
Sebastian Kubitschko
and Anne Kaun
Innovative Methods in Media and Communication
Research
Sebastian Kubitschko Anne Kaun
Editors
Innovative Methods
in Media and
Communication
Research
Editors
Sebastian Kubitschko Anne Kaun
University of Bremen (ZeMKI) Sdertrn University
Bremen, Germany Huddinge, Sweden
How we research the social world can seem to be the concern only of pro-
fessional academics. Even among academics, books about methods tend
to be the books you consult only when you have to, while debates about
methods (methodological debates), although they sometimes come to the
fore in particular academic fields, generally do so under disguise, as dis-
putes about ontology, new paradigms, and the like. A major collection
of essays by young scholars on what is at stake in innovative methods is
therefore a notable event.
The context indeed could not be more urgent. The transformations
of what we still try to call the media environment over the past quarter-
century have been profound. Twenty-five years ago the challenge for
media and communications scholars was to reflect on the implications of
expanding television channels and everyday video recording. In the early
years of the internets commercialization, modes of internet access seemed
to play out in a parallel world of their ownthe world of cyberspace
which attracted its explorers and methodological pioneers. Yet their work
could safely be ignored by the mainstream of media research, although by
2000 it was clear that the internet was going at some point to bring major
transformations.
Those times of normal science and quarantined exploration seem
unrecognizable today. The past fifteen years have disturbed the comfort-
able division of labor in media research between mainstream and innova-
tive margins, and in their course dismantled the boundaries around media
research itself. No actual or would-be researcher of media today can
avoid the questions of where exactly to cut in to our lives with media, why
v
vi FOREWORD TO INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION...
make that cut exactly, and relying on what combination of research tech-
niques and skills. Not only have the surface features of media, the range of
their contents, the modes of their production or delivery to audiences, and
the complexity of their intertextual connections changed hugely in the
past fifteen years, but so too has the way in which media contents, media
choices, and media-related practices are embedded in daily life. Entirely
new portals of media consumption now exist (such as YouTube and social
media platforms); meanwhile, the options for, in some sense, producing
media content, or distributing it on a significant scale, have also expanded
massively. The result is a complexity, a flux, that is genuinely puzzling at
times, posing major difficulties in how to capture it.
Yet this is only the first transformation whose impacts on how we
research the social world must be considered. Two further transforma-
tions stem from the nature of the internet itself, distinctive features that
have only become clear, to most of us at least, in the past five to eight
years. During its first few years, the internet was predominantly discussed
as a space of freedom, a space into which human agency could expand
by acquiring more information, making personal connections, joining up
information and things in new ways: a technology of freedom, in Ithiel
de Sola Pools resonant phrase. As the size, depth, and multi-layeredness
of internet space expanded, it increasingly became clear that much work
is needed simply to keep track of the proliferating variety of the things
we do online, or with/through media reached online: this was the so-
called practice turn in media research that has broken apart the traditional
boundaries of media studies since the early 2000s.
Looking back, however, this transformation was to be succeeded by
a further transformation potentially much more disruptive to the study
not just of media, but of the social world in all its forms. This third trans-
formation has reconfigured the specialist space of media research as part
of a wider continuum in which information and computer science, soci-
ology of the economy and information, legal studies, and many other
disciplinary traditions converge. This third transformation derived from
changes deep within the production of online content and online interac-
tion spaces, which have profoundly altered the nature of the internet as an
infrastructure. The impetus came primarily from a crisis in the advertising
industries, which could no longer reliably reach their audiences in a world
of proliferating informational content: the result was the construction,
over time, of ever more sophisticated ways of tracking automatically what
people do online, as they do it, and the distribution of that data for value
FOREWORD TO INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION... vii
within and beyond the media industries, a story that Joseph Turow in par-
ticular has told brilliantly. The corporate gathering of consumer data goes
back to the late 1980s, as Turows former Annenberg School colleague
Oscar Gandy uncovered, and states have, of course, for two centuries tried
to gather data about citizens. However, the latter state-based gathering
was for a very long time confined to discrete chunks of information related
to isolated moments, aggregated only with difficulty, and affording only
broad snapshots of populations. Automated tracking of computer-based
action, driven by corporate innovations (cookies and the like) and com-
bined with huge increases in networked computing power, has, however,
in the past decade normalized continuous data gathering in every domain
of online life. The embedded software that gathers and processes such data
has become a banal, if often hidden, element of doing anything online.
The resulting rise of data collection has been so profound that it is
now driving new types of object in the world. The internet of things is
just a catchy phrase for something rather more interesting: the routine
embedding not simply of online connection, but automated data gather-
ing and data processing in an infinitely expandable set of everyday objects
and tools. Parallel transformations in information gathering and process-
ing have been under way in specialized domains, such as the physical and
medical sciences, trading markets, and so on. From the combination of
these many local transformations has come the phenomenon of Big
Data and the banal installation of automated data surveillance in every
stream of social life.
The methodological challenges that flow from this profound transfor-
mation in how the world is mediated through online infrastructures are
twofold: first, we have at work in daily life devices and systems for track-
ing people, bodies, and objects, which may, or may not, generate social
knowledge; second, and not tracked by the new devices and systems them-
selves, there are the social, political, and cultural adjustments to the pres-
ence of such tracking in daily life, which generate new types of reflexive
problem for human subjects that, in turn, require new ways of studying
those problems and how they are, or are not, resolved.
In response to these more recent transformations and challenges,
some commentators seem to have lost their head completely. When Chris
Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, proclaimed Big Data as the har-
binger of the End of Theory (a claim noted, and rejected, in this books
introduction), he mistook the role of commentator for legislator; fortu-
nately, until now, the world has ignored his imperious proposal. Much
viii FOREWORD TO INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION...
Part I Materiality13
Saskia Sassen
ix
x Contents
Part II Technology75
Noortje Marres
Part IV Visualization221
Lev Manovich
Author Index321
Subject Index325
Notes on Contributors
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
Erin Despard holds a PhD from Concordia University, Canada, and has
been a visiting researcher and postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, UCLA,
and McGill University. Despards research on the communicative func-
tioning of parks, gardens and other urban environments has appeared in
Environment and Planning D: Space and Society, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Culture, Landscape Research and Space and Culture, among others.
She is currently an adjunct professor in the Departement dhistoire at the
Universit de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, where she is working on a
book manuscript entitled Montral, la ville fleurie: An Archaeology of
Urban Landscape and Horticultural Media.
Alberto Frigo is a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication
Studies at Sdertrn University, Sweden. He has been project leader at
MIT, USA, and has taught at Tongji University in Shanghai. Frigos early
interest in lifelogging has resulted in http://2004-2040.com, a 36 years
depiction of himself and his surroundings. The project includes, for
instance, a record of his activities based on the photos of all the objects his
right hand uses. Exhibited worldwide, the project was awarded the presti-
gious Prix Ars Electronica in 2006. As part of his PhD thesis, Frigo inves-
tigates meaning-making of manually compiled lifelogs such as the one he
is creating.
Jonathan Grayis a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is also Research Associate at the Digital
Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, and Director of Policy and
Research at Open Knowledge. His current research focuses on the politics
of data.
Richard Huskey is a doctoral candidate at the University of California
Santa Barbaras Media Neuroscience Lab, and incoming Assistant Professor
at the School of Communication, the Ohio State University, USA. Richard
is the principle investigator at the Cognitive Communication Science Lab
and the digital media coordinator for the International Communication
Associations Communication Science and Biology Interest Group. His
research lies at the intersection of media psychology and cognitive neuro-
science with a particular focus on how media content influence human
cognition and behavior. Philosophically grounded in an understanding of
the mind (and the communication phenomena it enables) as a physical
property of the brain, his research investigates three core topics: attitude
and behavior change, media enjoyment and influence of moral narratives.
xvi Notes on Contributors
xxi
xxii List of Figures
xxv
EDITOR Biography
xxvii
CHAPTER 1
SebastianKubitschko andAnneKaun
S. Kubitschko (*)
University of Bremen (ZeMKI), Bremen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Kaun
Sdertrn University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
The characteristics that the majority of available handbooks share are that
they tend to engage in depth with one particular, traditional method like
content analysis, interviewing, or participant observation and tend to lack
comparative or overview aspects (Krippendorf 2013). Another corpus of
publications shares a very generic perspective on media and communications
and does not necessarily take into account contemporary methodological
developments (Hansen and Machin 2013; Berger 2014). Still other meth-
odology handbooks focus exclusively on particular approaches like visual
methods (Banks and Zeitlyn 2015) or online qualitative methods (Salmons
2015), zero in on a singular technology like mobile media (Bscher etal.
2011), or introduce specific digital tools and methods to study new media
and communication phenomena such as issue networks (Rogers 2013;
Bellotti 2015). Then again, scholars have modified methodological guide-
lines like ethnographic research to investigate the internets role in present-
day social worlds (Horst and Miller 2012; Hine 2015; Kozinets 2015; Pink
etal. 2016). In their respective field of inquiry these methods books have
proven to be highly valuable sources of inspiration and guidance.
Publications that share features with our approach of bringing inven-
tive methods into dialogue with established ones from a critical cultural
perspective tend to leave aside an explicit contextualizing of media and
communications (Strydom 2011; Amelina et al. 2014; Kara 2015).
While Bonnie Brennens (2012) work on Qualitative Research Methods
for Media Studies comes closer to our own approach within the realm of
media and communications, her volume focuses on integrating practice
and theory. What distinguishes this volume from many existing books is
that it seeks to explore both the conceptual and the practical aspects of
innovative methods for media and communication research. On the one
hand, we aim to give researchers input for critical reflection and are taking
stock of currently evolving methods in the field. On the other hand, we
wish to give readers the hands-on research literacies essential for planning
and conducting research. The purpose of this book is to feature a body of
research that shines a light on the diversity and liveliness of contemporary
methods in media and communication studies. What we aim to empha-
size is that there is not one singular answer to the questions raised by the
constantly changing media environment. In other words, this book is not
about one-dimensionality but about multi-facetedness.
The overall subject that holds the project together is therefore less
issue oriented than thematically structured. Rather than structuring the
book along strict disciplinary boundaries, its component parts encompass
6 S. KUBITSCHKO AND A. KAUN
range of political experiences through the lens of media? How are commu-
nal experiences produced through media practices?
Part IV on Visualization is introduced by Lev Manovich, a pioneer in
computational analysis of large data sets and visualization techniques. In
Chap. 12, Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, Stefania Milan, and Paolo
Ciuccarelli underline the importance of developing a critical literacy to read,
understand, and work with data visualizations in contemporary information
environments. By proposing a three-part heuristic framework, the chap-
ter contributes toward a critical literacy for data visualizations as research
objects and devices in order to support their critical and reflexive use. In
Chap. 13, Luca Simeone and Paolo Patelli build on their experience as
designers and researchers within Urban Sensing, a research project aimed at
creating software that gathers and analyzes geo-located information posted
on social networks. Simeone and Patelli provide helpful empirical material
for researchers to reflect on the potential and limitations of social network
analysis and data visualization as research methods in urban studies. In Chap.
14, Nicolas Baya-Laffite and Jean-Philippe Cointet map the United Nations
Climate Conventions negotiations topic structure and evolution over
twenty years using a digital corpus. The methodological strategy that Baya-
Laffite and Cointet explore is based on computer-assisted tools and tech-
niques of text mining, semantic network analysis, and data visualization that
allow both quantitative and qualitative insights to be obtained. In Chap. 15,
Katharina Lobinger discusses the advantage of creative visual methods
beyond the image-centered scopes of visual communication research. More
concretely, Lobinger puts emphasis on different forms of participatory
approaches, on visual Q-sort studies and card-sorting procedures, and on
creative drawing-based exercises to signal the relevance of visual methods
for audience studies in media and communication research. The chapters
share an interest in investigating visualizations as means of making sense of
the world. Visualizations and visual methods in that sense become a way of
knowing the world as well as creating new ecologies to be known.
The concluding chapter acts in the first instance as an amalgamating
entity. Even more importantly, it articulates a methodological advisory
register and formulates a (more or less) provoking outlook on the road
ahead of media and communication research.
Now, before we give the stage to the empirical chapters, we want to
thank all the contributing authors for their commitment to and belief
in this project. Without your drive for deepening understanding of the
contemporary media environment and its role in the social world, this
AN INTRODUCTION TOINNOVATIVE METHODS INMEDIA... 11
book would not existits as simple as that. We want to thank the three
reviewers for their productive and supportive feedback, which has without
doubt enhanced this volume considerably. Thanks to Felicity Plester and
Sophie Auld at Palgrave Macmillan, who have supported and guided us
not only in a very professional but also a kindly and dedicated way. We also
want to give thanks to Aram Bartholl (and Janet Leyton-Grant) for giving
us the possibility to use his humorous, critical, and fitting artwork and Lisa
Jung for her wonderful support on the cover design. Finally, we want to
thank all the brilliant colleagues who have supported the publication of
this volume early on by stating their interest in the project.
References
Adkins, L. and Lury, C. (2009) Introduction: What is the Empirical? European
Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 520.
Amelina, A., Nergiz, D., Faist, T., et al. (Eds.) (2014) Beyond Methodological
Nationalism: Social Science Research Methods in Transition (London: Routledge).
Anderson, C. (2008) The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific
Method Obsolete. Wired 23 June: http://www.wired.com/2008/2006/pb-
theory/ (accessed 10 March 2016).
Back, L. and Puwar, N. (2012) A Manifesto for Live Methods: Provocations and
Capacities. The Sociological Review 60(S1): 617 .
Banks, M. and Zeitlyn, D. (2015) Visual Methods in Social Research. 2nd ed.
(London: Sage).
Bellotti, E. (2015) Qualitative Networks: Mixing Methods in Social Research (New
York: Routledge).
Berger, A. (2014) Media and Communication Research: An Introduction to
Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 3rd ed. (London: Sage).
Brennen, B. (2012) Qualitative Research Methods for Media Studies (London:
Routledge).
Bscher, M., Urry, J.and Witchger, K. (Eds.) (2011) Mobile Methods (London:
Routledge).
Hand, M. (2014) From Cyberspace to the Dataverse: Trajectories in Digital Social
Research. In: M.Hand and S.Hillyard (Eds.), Big Data? Qualitative Approaches
to Digital Research (Bingley: Emerald), pp.127.
12 S. KUBITSCHKO AND A. KAUN
Materiality
SaskiaSassen
S. Sassen ()
Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
14 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
One way in which this partial reshaping of the technical by social logics
of users and/or settings becomes evident is that similar, and even the
same, technical properties can produce strikingly different outcomes
across diverse settings. Depending on the logics guiding use, digital capa-
bilities can contribute to very diverse outcomes. They can contribute to
distributive outcomes, for instance by enabling greater participation of
local organizations in global networks; thereby they can help constitute
transboundary public spheres or forms of globality centered in multiple
localized types of struggles and agency.
However, these same properties can also lead to higher levels of control
and concentration in the global capital market (Sassen 2012). And they can
do so even though the power of these financial electronic networks rests on
a kind of distributed power; that is, millions of investors distributed around
the world and their millions of individual decisions. Thus, while digitization
of instruments and markets was critical to the sharp growth in the value and
power of the global capital market, this outcome was shaped by interests and
logics that typically had little to do with digitization per se. This brings to the
fore the extent to which digitized markets are embedded in complex institu-
tional settings, cultural frames, and even intersubjective dynamics. In turn,
much place boundedness is today increasinglyalthough not completely
inflected or inscribed by the hypermobility of some of its components,
products, and outcomes. More than in the past, both fixity and mobility are
located in a temporal frame where speed is ascendant and consequential, but
immobilities and slow-downs are also very much part of it all.
When it comes to very practical issues, there is often a poverty of social
imagination in the analysisit is all flattened into description even when
the case includes very complex systems. For instance, we have enormously
detailed descriptions of how and why local governments deploy all kinds
of digital sensorsfor fire, floods, deterioration of key components of
mechanical systems, all part of the smart city. Yet these are descriptions,
and we need to go beyond descriptions and explore whether these practi-
cal applications lend themselves to interpretations that might include social
variables and theorized examinations of the larger settings within which
they are inserted. The city puts technologies to a test: it is one window
into understanding successful technological innovations for urban systems
and urban life. Here the chapter Engaging (Past) Participants: The Case
of radicalprintshops.org by Jess Baines makes a very good contribution:
it focuses on a wiki and its practical applications, but then takes these on a
theoretical walk that brings in the social.
MATERIALITY 15
Socio-political processes can emerge from the use of even a simple tech-
nology, especially if they involve people. We must capture these effects in
our analyses of the technologies, even if they are peripheral. Further, they
can also mobilize across neighborhoods, because the tech enables that.
I find that one key issue is the need to urbanize these technologies; that
is to say, to bring them out of the techie zone and into the messy urban
zone. The active and mutually shaping interaction of the digital and place
or, more generically, material spaces is at work in the chapter A Materialist
Media Ecological Approach to Studying Urban Media in/of Place by
Erin Despard. One effect is changes in conceptions of place and their role
in mediated communication. The chapter Socio-Spatial Approaches for
Media and Communication Research by Segah Sak brings to the fore that
research on digital media benefits from socio-spatial analyses, and offers
the elements of such an approach.
Cities will almost inevitably leave an imprint on most technologiesit
is rarely feasible simply to plop down a new technology, for example, in an
urban space. I would argue that these kinds of analyses also signal the need
to push the urbanizing of technology further, and in different directions
including settings we have neglected, for instance low-income neighbor-
hoods and workplaces, and settings in other parts of the world that are
radically different from those described in all three chapters. Diverse ecol-
ogies of meaning may be generated from similar technical capabilities.
We can think of these cultural and spatial differences as pushing the open
sourcing of at least some technologies by mobilizing the intelligences, the
needs, and the imaginations of residents.
The DNA of the city is more akin to open source technology. An approach
that takes this factor into account would enable interactions between the
technology and the user beyond those already pre-programmed within
these systems. Historically, I find that it is the combination of the incom-
pleteness and the complexity of major cities that has enabled them to out-
live enterprises, kingdoms, and nation-states. These are all rather closed
formal systems, and this has made them rigid and more susceptible to
disintegration. One implication of this development (there are more) is
that the new trend toward installing a growing range of closed, controlled
intelligent systems in cities puts those cities at risk of becoming obsolete
themselves when the technologies become obsolete.
Across time, cities have complicated the straightforward implementa-
tion of technologies. Elsewhere I have examined this through the question
Does the City have Speech? (Sassen 2013). The mix of urban materialities
16 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
and peoples cultures in a city is not quite predictable, and hence can
unsettle or disrupt the best designs. This holds at many levelsfrom a vast
structural transportation system and so-called intelligent systems installed
in buildings, to a minimalist pothole-detection wiki. The city puts tech-
nologies to the test: it is one window into understanding successful tech-
nological innovations for urban systems and urban life. Therewith the city
also is a lens that allows us to understand the diverse interactions between
users (whether systems, organizations, or people) and the design and
implementation of the technologies used in cities.
Recognizing that digital technologies often engage socio-material con-
ditions opens up a research agenda about their access and use. It is not
simply about the fact that such digital capabilities exist. These capabilities
are made and so are their infrastructures and software, and since societies
contain vastly different opportunities as well as marginalization structures,
we must allow for the fact that not all potential users and potential types of
uses are necessarily in play. Further, some types of potential uses may not
be sustained by existing software, and some users may lack access.
Getting to the heart of these diverse engagements with digital capabili-
ties requires not only understanding the particular features of cities, but
also seeing the issue as if one were a city. In other words, it requires a jug-
gling of the diversity of elements that constitute urban space, which inevi-
tably means a multi-perspective approach. The city is a generous partner in
this work: it offers a lens into larger realities, many non-urban but that in
todays economic structuring have an urban moment in their trajectories.
This type of analysis keeps us from simply being technologists. It helps us
factor in the friction and obstacles that even the most advanced technolo-
gies or engineering confront in urban environments.
REFERENCES
Sassen, S. (2016) Digital Cultures of Use and Their Infrastructures. In J.Wajcman
and N.Dodd (Eds.), The Sociology of Speed (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Sassen, S. (2013) Does the City have Speech? Public Culture 25(2): 20921.
Sassen, S. (2012) Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations
of the Powerful and the Powerless. Information, Communication and Society
5(4): 45578.
CHAPTER 2
JessBaines
J. Baines ()
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
for reasons of safety (Flinn 2008). The alternative left culture that grew up
in the printshops was also one in which an anti-bureaucratic ethos often
prevailed (Landry etal. 1985), with little importance attached to keeping
records (Chong 2011; Swash 2011). While independent community and
radical archives can sometimes provide vital sources of marginal or otherwise
overlooked activity, such resources frequently exist in precarity due to lack of
economic resources, scarcity of space, and the fluctuations of interested vol-
unteers (Bosi and Reiter 2014). Furthermore, ideological or idiosyncratic
rejections of storage, handling, access, and cataloguing conventions can also
frustrate the academic researchers expectations.
What evidential traces that still existed of the printshops were likely to
be mainly in the hands (or dusty boxes) of ex-participants. This connected
to another problem: I had only a small handful of ex-printshop contacts.
The aims of my research were congruent with a qualitative rather than
quantitative approach, in that I sought to elicit detail, texture, experience,
and diversity to build a nuanced historical analysis (Flick 2007). The quali-
tative approach means that the numbers of respondents or cases are neces-
sarily small (Bauer and Gaskell 2009, p.42). However, not only were my
contacts limited, they were inevitably prejudiced toward particular organi-
zations. As Jolly etal. (2012) have discussed in relation to their Womens
Liberation Movement research, the recent history of radical organizations
and movements raises particular problems of representationwho speaks
or gets asks to speak, and within that whose version of the past prevails.
If my research was going to be based on empirical data, be properly his-
torical rather than a more abstract theoretical consideration that drew on
loose generalizations, there was an arduous task ahead of tracing as many
ex-members as I could, and of persuading them to share information and
be interviewed. Interviews would be a crucial tool for research given the
apparently thin documentation of the printshops.
The issue of both finding interviewees and convincing them of the
value of giving me their time was serious. This is a common problem for
researchers (Seale et al. 2007), and with regard to locating subjects of
marginal and no longer existing activities, it can be especially so (Rubin
and Rubin 2011). However, my own background as an ex-printshop
participant gave me a relatively privileged starting position in that (a) I
had some names and a few contacts already; and (b) our common history
might provide some basis for trust. The printshops were also part of a
wider alternative left milieu of politics, shared living, friendships, and rela-
tionships, and as such I anticipated that there would be some vestiges of
ENGAGING (PAST) PARTICIPANTS: THECASE OFRADICALPRINTSHOPS.ORG 21
this that would assist with a snowball of contacts. The snowball sample
is typically useful when, as Lorenzo Mosca puts it, focusing on hard to
reach populations [ and] where the members know each other (2014,
p.409). Concerning the issue of what value potential interviewees might
cede to the research, the casual conversation that had prompted it provided
some encouragement. Ex-members would also be of an age where their
involvement might now be viewed as a distinct and possibly significant part
of their own life history. Whether they would value an academic research
project, or want to discuss this period in their life or share their shoebox
archives with me, was of course another matter. It was a long time ago and
it was not part of a history that had been culturally validated since. For well
over twenty years the collective experiments of the 1970s and 1980s in
working and living differently had essentially been consigned to the history
dustbin marked uncool (Sholette 2011; see also Hesmondhalgh 2000).
Edward Thompsons memorable words that presaged the simultaneously
flourishing movement for history from below might well be applied to
these attempts: Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspira-
tions anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys,
the lost causes and the losers themselves are forgotten (1968, p.12). As
recently as 2007, Colin MacCabe and Stuart Hall agreed that the reason
that these experiments had gone unwritten by those involved was that it
was too painful (MacCabe 2007, p.27). It is only recently, and really after
I began the research, that this situation has been noticeably reversed.
The combination of these factors led to the decision to experiment with
building a preliminary online resource, the open wiki radicalprintshops.org,
as an adjunct and possible aid to the academic research. In the first instance
the site would serve to publicly share the material I was finding. The antici-
pated audience was printshop members and a wider activist and radical lay
audience. The site seemed like a way to begin to bridge the gap between
the formal process and outcome of the academic project and its subjects. It
would hold documents, images, and maybe participant accounts, operating
as an organically developing open archive, a sort of niche knowledge com-
mons. It would also start to give the history of the printshops a visible and
affirmative online presence that printshop members unknown to me might
encounter. I hoped that it would stimulate interest from ex-participants,
individually and collectively, in the general value of producing such a his-
tory. By setting the site up as a wiki, it also held the possibility for them to
contribute in their own time and terms, a sort of micro crowdsourcing
(Howe 2006) to begin to generate a loosely collaborative history.3 That in
22 J. BAINES
SETTING UPTHEWIKI
To some extent, everyone knows roughly what a wiki is, mainly because
of Wikipedia (launched in 2001). In brief then, the first wiki software
(WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s
to enable a community of software developers to work together. Wikis are
ENGAGING (PAST) PARTICIPANTS: THECASE OFRADICALPRINTSHOPS.ORG 23
This site is devoted to building a history of Londons late 20th century radical
and community printing collectives []. This is a history that doesnt exist
except in the memories of ex-workers, friends and clients. The idea is that
people who were involved in the printshops can create and edit the pages.
served to introduce the idea of a history of the printshops, and showed the
beginnings of a visible and accessible outcome, which I hoped might be a
hook to encourage participation. If people were interested in the wiki they
might also be interested further down the line in being interviewed by
me, and I used this email to introduce the research project. The response
to both the wiki and the academic research was generally encouraging. At
this stage I had not put any information on the site about who had insti-
gated it, or that its instigator was doing academic research into the subject,
although this information appeared elsewhere online (for example, my
university profiles).
Over a four-year period about thirty-five people registered as radi-
calprintshop.org users, most of them within the first two years after its
inception. Although not a large number, it was more than I had expected.
Throughout this time I periodically emailed my contact list of printshop
members with updates about the wiki and to encourage contributions.
Twenty-three of the thirty-five registered actually contributed content,
ten of them by directly uploading and the remaining thirteen by send-
ing contributions through the wikis contact form or by email, for me
to upload. The explanation given by some for the latter was that they
either were not confident enough to upload themselves or that they had
tried and failed. By the end of 2013, eight of the forty pages/namespaces
on the wiki had been set up by registered users and twenty-five differ-
ent pages/namespaces had been contributed to. There were perhaps four
super contributors, although I remained the key contributor by far.
Content added ranged from cursory to extensive printshop biographies,
personal photographs and memories, lists of printing equipment, and
images of work printed. Some pages bulged; some were still scant. There
was a marked profile of those who contributed: they had either worked
in several printshops or had been a founder member of a press. This was
unsurprising, as greater length of involvement and/or intense start-up
commitment would have made their time in the printshops a significant
period in their lives and as such probably led to a greater motivation or
interest in the printshops historicization. Those who registered were
overwhelmingly male, but two (half) of the super contributors were
female. Of the people who uploaded, I was in contact with only two of
them when the wiki launched. Overall I had previously known less than a
quarter of those who contributed and over half of those who contributed
had found the site independently.
ENGAGING (PAST) PARTICIPANTS: THECASE OFRADICALPRINTSHOPS.ORG 27
CHALLENGE NO. 1
One of the risks of initiating a collaborative history, however informally,
is that conflicting versions of events lead to unresolved and confusing
content, can cause friction between individuals, and can deter involve-
ment. The edit war is of course a well-known phenomenon of Wikipedia
(Tkacz 2014). In the case of radicalprintshops.org this could take on a
very different tenor, because the subject was peoples own history and
personal understanding of what had happened and/or why and with
people they had once known or still knew. While the site was intended to
be a positive recognition of that history, like most collective projects (or
indeed any kind of organization) the printshops had their share of internal
conflicts, people who did not get on. In my academic research this was of
interestand the responsibility for a broader interpretation was mine. The
wiki was another matter. Concern about this had been flagged up early on
after a reunion of some print co-op members, with one person emailing
me to say: I must admit I was slightly concerned how time had changed
some events and facts, but hopefully you will solve all that. The wiki cer-
tainly could not solve all that.
This aspect of co-writing history remained a particularly hindering fac-
tor for a couple of contributors and came up in several email exchanges:
Such a wiki raises all sorts of questions about who and what exactly
can be mentioned/quoted/talked about without their permission. Also
about who writes which history; how is collective writing managed in
28 J. BAINES
could block users, limit access rights, delete namespaces, and of course
take down the site. This obviously is not an egalitarian situation. I had
hoped that in time others might emerge as co-admins, but had devised no
strategy to especially encourage thisand no one was putting themselves
forward. In a sense, I was pleased that anyone else contributed at all.
Preparatory research into setting up the wiki had been primarily tech-
nical. I provided no FAQs (frequently asked questions), guidelines, or
support manuals about how or what to write or edit. This was for vari-
ous reasons: (a) I wanted to see what happened; (b) I did not know what
such guidance would look like; (c) I did not want to hinder participa-
tion through creating rules that might be felt to be patronizing; (d) I
hoped that how to do this would reveal itself (to me as well) through
experiment rather than direction; and (e) there was already enough to
do! Retrospectively, more support around the process in the provision
of this sort of material is likely to have encouraged people to contribute
rather than dissuading them. It would not have been a case of reinventing
the wheel, given that various existing wikis provide such guidelines that I
could have drawn on and adapted.
CHALLENGE NO. 2
The other and more overwhelming issue that emerged was spam; the site
was increasingly subject to attacks. Pages were frequently hijacked and
filled with all manner of commercial junk. The emails that told me a new
user had registered poured in from marauding bots. Block deleting them
was risky, in case they contained a message from a human user. There might
be two hundred to go through at any one time. Open registration on wikis
makes them especially vulnerable to spambots, unless like Wikipedia you
have the resources and technical infrastructure to counteract them. The
time I spent on wiki admin, essentially clearing junk, increased exponen-
tially, leaving little time for developing the site, leave alone encouraging
people to contribute. I became cautious about publicizing the site in case
I had not had time to remove offending spam. While I had the support of
my technically superior comrade, who tried to help resolve these issues
we experimented with different CAPTCHA plugins, for examplethey
inevitably returned. This is something that would have been eased with
more sustained user commitment; removing spam from pages at least is a
basic editing task. While wiki-gnome and wiki-fairy tasks were relatively
satisfying, the lone role of housework zombie was not.
30 J. BAINES
The obvious way to address this would have been to cease open
registration, as this was what allowed spam into the site. Those already
registered would still have their password and new users would make con-
tact with the site admin to acquire one, which would be a sort of filtering
process. It creates another admin task, but is far less onerous than dealing
with spam. It also creates a direct relationship between the admin/myself
and prospective contributors that on the one hand may have encouraged
greater involvement. On the other hand, it removes a level of autonomy
and possible anonymity from the process, which might deter some people.
CHALLENGE NO. 3
The third challenge took a rather different shape. As the main contribu-
tor to the wiki, I had been sharing materials gathered in pursuit of my
original and far from completed academic research. I had assumed that
interest in the wiki would be from ex-participants, the lay field of radical
historians, artists and activists, and curious others (a few of whom were
my students), but mainly beyond the bounds of serious professional
and institutional interests. Within the field of media and communica-
tion studies too, my old media subject was a marginal curio at best.
However, a revival of craft-based radicalism and an upsurge of art world
interest in collectives of the 1970s and 1980s began to generate a small
but steady stream of attention and requests from this direction. Even the
phrase radical and community printshops that I had usedand that
had long ceased to exist as a meaningful couplingbegan to circulate.
A trickle of students from different art institutions now emailed me to
help with their dissertations on radical and community printshops, hav-
ing discovered the wiki. In 2012, a new book on radical posters came
out and, while skimming for possible research leads, I had the dawning
realization that significant information must have been derived from the
wiki, and more precisely from what I had written. I scanned the bibli-
ography for acknowledgment of this, but there was none. With some
trepidation, I contacted the author, who admitted that the wiki had
indeed been a great help, and apologized for not having got in touch.
A few months later another situation arose with a professional in the
cultural field whose funded and well-regarded project was based on their
research into radical and community printshops. Again, the sources
of this research were derived from the wiki, similarly unacknowledged.
More occurrences of this ilk arose.
ENGAGING (PAST) PARTICIPANTS: THECASE OFRADICALPRINTSHOPS.ORG 31
On the one hand it was cheering that in a small way, the subject of the
printshops had started to become hot and I seemed to have helped this
along by making publicly accessible hitherto unknown information and
source material. It indicated that the research subject was timely and that
there was probably a wider audience than I had imagined. While I posi-
tively liked the fact that bits from the wiki were being pasted across the
web on various radical websites or individuals blogs, unacknowledged use
of its content by paid professionals, particularly when presented as their
own research, was disconcerting. I had spent a lot of unpaid time on the
wiki, not just uploading and writing but managing the tech issues as well
as supporting and encouraging other users. My own academic work was a
long way from completion, and its main strength was its original subject
matter. As Dunleavy (2003) cautions, research that is empirically rather
than theoretically original is always vulnerable to losing this claim. A ten-
sion had emerged between the aspirations for the wiki and the possible
need to protect my academic research interests. In their user analysis of
the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Howard and her colleagues also found
that academics were put off from using the wiki function in part because
they are unwilling to share rough drafts of work with all comers (and in
any case would probably not post something they may want to publish in
a more formal context later on) (Howard etal. 2011, p.8).
During this time I decided that it was prudent to put my own name
somewhere on the wiki, and to state that I had initiated it and that it was
an adjunct to academic research on the subject. However, I could have put
a request on the site for professionals in the academic and cultural field to
reference it. We had set a Creative Commons non-commercial reuse and
attribution required terms of reuse for the site content, but this lingered
as a tiny logo at the bottom of scrollable pages and was not drawn atten-
tion to. We could have made more of this.
UNDER MAINTENANCE
After four years, user contributions to the wiki had dwindled to near zero
and the time I spent on it was mostly dealing with spam. Maintaining it with
limited time, knowledge, resources, and support was becoming untenable.
Added to this was the lingering concern about the extent to which I might
have unwittingly been undermining my academic research and future pub-
lishing opportunities by making such a range of source material so publicly
available, before the completion of my academic research project. Until I
32 J. BAINES
could work out a way to resolve these very different issues, I decided to
archive the site and temporarily take it offline. This raised a new ethical
consideration. Did taking it down invalidate the ethics of reciprocity that I
had hoped the wiki might partially serve? What in this context was the site
instigator and admins responsibility to the others who contributed to the
wiki? The situation exposed the asymmetric relationship between myself,
as sole admin, and the registered users, in terms of agenda, authority, and
labor. Unless users were willing or able to get more involved, they had
little say in decisions about the overall site management.
CONCLUSION
There is much that might be said in terms of how the radicalprintshops.
org wiki could be better set up to facilitate a collaborative knowledge
base, and I have covered some aspects of this already. In the context of
this book, however, it is on the brief evaluation of it as an aid to academic
research that I want to end. First, the wiki helped to socialize the idea of
a history of printshops among ex-participants. It enabled the renewal of
communications with ex-colleagues and associates and the introduction
to many more whom I had never known. While the wikis value for direct
information gathering was limited, my knowledge of the scope of different
printshops significantly expanded, which was invaluable for my research.
The wiki also quickly began to function as a useful organizational tool for
the research, revealing gaps and relationships. Finally, and perhaps most
instrumental to the research, it developed many fruitful new contacts who
were more than willing to be interviewed and dig through their personal
documents to assist me. For many of them in fact this was preferable to
contributing to the wiki. During the course of the research I interviewed
about seventy people, double the number of registered wiki users.
Initially the wiki had helped address my ambivalence regarding the dis-
tance between academic process and form and my subject/s. The timing of
it for generating interest and contacts was at the right stage of the research:
early on, while I was working out what shape the project should take, what
my questions were, and what methods I was going to use. On the other
hand, it was possibly too early to experiment with building a collaborative
history. I did not have sufficient resources (time and knowledge) to maintain
the site effectively or to support contributors properly. I was also ignorant
at the outset of what that might actually mean. It was probably too early as
well to be sharing so much original research data on a public site. None of
these issues is insurmountable, but all require pre-emptive consideration.
ENGAGING (PAST) PARTICIPANTS: THECASE OFRADICALPRINTSHOPS.ORG 33
NOTES
1. The WikiPapers site was set up in 2010 by Emilio Rodrguez-Posada to
create the most comprehensive literature compilation for this research area
(see http://wikipapers.referata.com).
2. The suggestion was based on a haphazard career trajectory that led to
employment as a lecturer in the printing trades college, now London
College of Communication (LCC), as well as involvement in small publica-
tions and exhibitions.
3. Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 Wired article, defines
it as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent
(usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined generally large
group of people in the form of an open call (Howe 2006, n.p.). The term
has been taken up by Mia Ridge (2014) in particular to describe initiatives
toward digital participation in institutional cultural heritage projects.
4. In the UK, for example, the Your Archives part of the National Archives site
and the Old Bailey Proceedings Online instigated wiki layers for users between
2007 and 2012 and 2009 and 2011, respectively (see http://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.
gov.uk, accessed 10 August 2016; see also Howard etal. 2011).
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CHAPTER 3
ErinDespard
The rise of pervasive, embedded, mobile, and locative media in cities has
greatly increased interest in questions of space and place in relation to
communication. As Scott McQuire (2008) asserts, the juxtaposition of
spaces and temporalities enabled by these new, or newly situated, media
forms shifts and disrupts the spatial orientations and boundaries that have
traditionally structured social relations. At the same time, attention to the
spatial dimensions of media is a way of revealing the politics of their geo-
graphically (and therefore, socially and economically) differential effects
(Couldry and McCarthy 2004). Of particular interest to many communi-
cation researchers are changing conceptions of place and the role of par-
ticular places within processes of mediated communication. The massive
uptake of mobile media, and particularly smartphones, has enabled the
production of seemingly infinite volumes of geocoded metadata that are
not only economically but, increasingly, socially and culturally valuable. In
what is more and more an era of conspicuous mobility, images of and
references to places are framing and providing the content for a variety of
communicative processes (Wilson 2012). At the same time, the installa-
tion and use of media in new places change how places and media alike
E. Despard ()
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
Both Fuller and Parikka base their theorizing for the most part on
media experiments undertaken by artists and activists. Through the incor-
poration of communication media in an artistic practice, or in collective
activities not envisioned in their design, the material, practical, and social
affordances of specific technologies can be tested and made to reveal rela-
tions of production and circulation otherwise obscured in everyday media
use. While this perspective opens a rich terrain for interdisciplinary, activist
investigations, it is not immediately clear how it may be used to ground
empirical investigation of less expert or more mundane forms of media
use. I am particularly interested in the way an inclusively materialist con-
ception of media ecology suggests an avenue for investigating the interac-
tive effects of media and place. If media is defined more broadly (as in
Peters 2015), then aspects of the place itself may be understood to medi-
ate in a manner comparable with communication technologies. Next I
present an orientation to empirical research inspired by the work of Fuller
and Parikka, which provides the means of developing methods for the
study of site-specific media relations.
see the world. Its restriction to mobile use, and its highly streamlined
functionality (relative to Facebook or Flickr, for example), makes it partic-
ularly conducive not only to instantaneous sharing of personal news (of the
where I am and what I am doing right now variety), but also to a pho-
tographic engagement with places. In this context, and given its aesthetic
capabilities (for example, via filters and other editing tools), it provides a
means of aestheticizing and elevating the social and cultural value of par-
ticular places, and the qualities and events associated with them.
In the course of these communicative and interpretative activities,
many users choose to share the location of their photographs.3 Even if
they do not, however, that location information is always included in
the metadata that, for those users whose profile is public, is provided
to anyone accessing Instagrams API (application programming inter-
face).4 This is because location data is increasingly crucial not only to
location-based advertising, but also to market research, much of which is
based on geographically organized demographic datasince where you
are says a great deal about your age, income, lifestyle, and so on (Phillips
and Curry 2002). With some exceptions (Gibbs etal. 2015; Hochman
2014; Hochman and Manovich 2013; Schwartz and Halegoua 2015;
Willim 2013), much of the research on Instagram to date has focused
on how to make best use of this data (for example, Latorre-Martnez
and Iguez-Berrozpe 2014; Silva etal. 2013; Schwartz and Hochman
2014; Zhang et al. 2013). While such research must presume certain
conventions of use, I wondered in contrast about the potential for a het-
erogeneous use of Instagram: Might the simplicity of the platform enable
its diversion toward more explicitly political ends than it was designed to
serve? In particular, I wanted to explore whether the aesthetic capacities
of Instagram might be deployed in the service of producing alternative
visibilities of contested public spaces. Suspending my doubts with respect
to the prospects of success, I undertook the pursuit of this nave hope as a
means to make clear some of the applications affordances and constraints
for political intervention at a specific site.
@ILOVENORTHKELVINMEADOW: ANAMBIVALENT
REVALUATION ANDFAILED POLITICIZATION OFPLACE
VIAINSTAGRAM
you need either (a) friends who are also on Instagram (and with whom
you likely share many interests, not to mention demographic characteris-
tics); or (b) images and tags that are both interesting and recognizable to
other Instagram users. In both cases, using Instagram effectively requires
that you associate your datathat you interpret your experience of the
worldin ways that are compatible with those of existing groups.
In this sense, while Instagram provides anyone with a smartphone and
data plan access to a virtual gallery space, free advertising, and/or a soap-
box (depending on your purposes), such uses are ultimately constrained
by the same market-based imperatives as other forms of publishing: as
Instagram advises, effective hashtags are specific but relevant; they stand
out and connect with the people most like you (Instagram Help website).
This effectively constrains the forms of visibility that can be produced or
reproduced through the application, which suggests that just as alternative
aesthetics require alternative technologies, so the production of an alter-
native visibilityat least through Instagramneeds to be thought about
in terms other than the multiplication of views.
While we may simply conclude that Instagram is not the most produc-
tive avenue through which to bring an alternative visibility of contested
urban places to light, being able to identify the specific constraints at work
within it is instructive with regard to knowing what we want when we look
for or devise new tools. How can a more nuanced visibility of a place such
as the North Kelvin Meadow be brought to a broader audience, if not
through advertising on social media? The point here is less to criticize the
performance of a given platform or the appropriateness of a given media
practice, and more to identify openings for further research and interven-
tion on behalf of creative and critical mediations of public places.
CONCLUSION
At the outset of this chapter, I observed both an increasing recognition
of the co-constitutive nature of media and place, and a lack of conceptual
and methodological tools for the empirical study of site-specific media
relations. The methodological strategy I have advanced in response is
designed in particular to grapple with the political implications inherent
in the mediation of public places. While mobile social media would seem
ideal for the purpose of democratizing the use and interpretation of public
places, the obscurity of their material relations to specific places makes it
difficult to critically evaluate or facilitate such processes.
54 E. DESPARD
NOTES
1. Timeto (2013) provides a good example of how such shortcomings can be
addressed through strategic couplings of ANT with non-representational
theory in this case, via software studies and a reading of activist urban art
practices as performative.
2. See Stats on www.instagram.com/press (accessed 10 November 2015).
These numbers would seem to reflect a disproportionate number of people
under the age of 30 (Raine etal. 2012).
3. Or at least, the location at the time the photograph was uploaded, which is
not always the same as where it was taken.
4. In November 2015, Instagram announced new limitations on the purposes
for which it will provide access to its API.As of this writing, it is not clear
whether requests to conduct scientific (as opposed to journalistic) research
will be granted.
5. http://www.northkelvinmeadow.com (accessed 10 March 2016).
6. The gallery can be viewed at https://www.instagram.com/ilovenorthkel-
vinmeadow (accessed 10 March 2016).
7. The frequently flat, gray, or white Glasgow sky is also a contributing factor
in the lack of these photographs.
8. This is reflected, for example, not only in the prominent display of the num-
ber of followers for a given account and the number of likes a given pho-
tograph receives, but also in the capacity to track who else your followers
have recently liked.
A MATERIALIST MEDIA ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TOSTUDYING URBAN... 55
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CHAPTER 4
SegahSak
S. Sak ()
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
e-mail: [email protected]
literary workfirst in his short story Burning Chrome (1982) and then
in the well-known science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984)academic
research embraced the association of physical space and the digital realm.
In this chapter, I engage with digital media research through an architec-
tural/urban viewpoint. My argument is that research on digital media does
and can further benefit from socio-spatial approaches to research. The chapter
will start by explaining the socio-spatial attributes of the digital realm. In the
following section, I will discuss the ways in which methods and approaches
of urban, environmental, and behavioral studies are being and can be further
adopted for digital media and communication research. Finally, I will sug-
gest an alternative approachnamely, considering digital spaces as places of
memoryto be employed by further research on the digital realm.
because of their drawbacks for some reason (King and Moreggi 2007). Virtual
teams are another example of networks that benefit highly from communica-
tion through the internet escaping the limitations of physical space, time, and
organizational boundaries, lowering travel and facility costs, reducing project
schedules, and improving decision-making time (Shayo etal. 2007).
Secondly, the digital realm allows the creation and representation of
cultural texts. Featherstone and Burrows (1995) point out the possibil-
ity of post-bodied form of existence, which can strengthen bodily exis-
tence in the physical public space by encouraging creativity and freedom
in communication, interaction, and production. Just as Nieckarz argues,
the internet provides a means for people to resist a centralized culture and
actively create and define things on their own (2005, p.421). It provides
opportunities for individuals to be able to express themselves freely and to
reach out for anything and anyone across the globe, contributing to the
collaborative creation of social capital.
Depending on the arguments used, it is possible to assert that there
is social production within the digital realm with respect to relationships
among people, and between people and their physical and digital environ-
ment. The digital realm, involving collective experiences and being pre-
cisely socially produced, inherits the attributes of space.
and electronic worlds are similar, and the activities of wayfinding and
navigation are similar to the information seeking activities of users of
information spaces (Dahlbck 1998, p. 15). Although these concepts
are primarily used in studies on virtual worlds (for example, Kohler etal.
2011), research on wayfinding and navigation, in general, present mod-
els for better evaluating or designing the digital realm depending on
human behavior (for example, Dieberger 1997; Spence 1999). In such
research, the cases are handled as means of information architecture, and
the patterns in the ways in which visual data guide movement are studied
in various contexts and scales. The technical computational aspects of
information architecture can be put aside within this chapter, and the pri-
mary subject matter can be defined as the cues present in the space of the
movement and the navigational reactions of users to these cues. Here, the
challenge in adopting methods of navigation research lies in the dichot-
omy of virtual and physical. The relevant behaviors and the entities that
govern movement within physical spaces and digital spaces have different
dimensionalities. Interface, which is the medium of interaction with the
digital realm, and the cues involved are still two dimensional. Movement,
on the other hand, is realized in a different dimension. In other words,
interaction with data and movement within data are not realized in the
same dimensions. Consequently, approaching with a socio-spatial point
of view, the methods of spatial research on navigation and wayfinding
are rendered inadequate for the digital realm. This is not because these
methods do not work for the navigational aspects of behavior in the
digital realm, but because they do not deal with the social aspects, which
provide the required dimension for the spatiality of digital spaces.
A socio-spatial approach to media and communication research can
be verified only by considering the multi-layered constitution of com-
plex human behavior. At this point, Dourish and Chalmerss (1994)
differentiation between spatial, semantic, and social forms of naviga-
tion provides an endorsement. The authors explain that although spatial
models can be used for virtual environments and for digital maps of
physical spaces, the systems that arrange information objects spatially
and hypertext systems require semantic navigation. At the same time,
they propose social navigation for the information systems that extend
to collaborative activity. Such a deconstruction abides by the complexity
of human behavior within both physical and digital spaces, and, in a way,
reconstructs the extensive concept of spatial cognition for contemporary
media, which is immensely social.
66 S. SAK
Cicero (2007) highlights that there should be various loci for disposition
of different groups of images and those loci should somehow be con-
nected, as if they were the different rooms of a structure. In her study
of the art of memory in different time periods, Yates makes a significant
statement, and asserts that the art of memory always uses contempo-
rary architecture for its memory places and contemporary imagery for its
images (1969, p.11) and therefore has its artistic periods.
In its classic and Renaissance periods, the art of memory was the
method of memorizing the encyclopaedia of knowledge, of reflecting the
world in memory (Yates 1969, p. 355). Later in the 17th century, the
method became an aid for investigating the encyclopaedia and the world
with the object of discovering new knowledge (Yates 1969, p.355) and
led to the scientific method. The method indicated by the art of memory
is the method of loci, which became the subject of many psychological
studies to understand how the act of remembering is realized and to pro-
pose ways to practice and improve memory against an increasing number
of mental disorders.
For collective memory, the art of memory is reflected in collective prac-
tices that facilitate remembering through the experience of urban spaces.
In The City of Collective Memory, Christine Boyer handles cities as places
of the art of collective memory: the city [] carries in the weaving and
unravelling of its fabric the memory traces of earlier architectural forms,
city plans, and public monuments (1994, p.31). In parallel, Aldo Rossi,
in his pioneering work The Architecture of the City, states that the city is
the locus of collective memory (Rossi 1982, p.130).
Hebbert (2005) focuses on streets and explains that a public space can
be a locus of collective memory in two ways. First, it can operate as a
memory space through its structures, monuments, symbols, and their syn-
tax. In this way, the urban space becomes a place in which memorial and
cultural texts that help societies remember are exhibited. Those cultural
texts depend on contemporary technologies and ideologies. Secondly, it
accommodates collective social practices and acts as a public sphere, pro-
viding a stage for public debates or gatherings (Boyer 1994, p.7). In a
similar approach, Casey (2004) sees public places as a component of public
memory where a public is embodied and public interaction takes place.
Boyer (1994) emphasizes this second aspect for deepening understanding
of the art of collective memory. Boyers argument is that the contemporary
approach to the art of collective memory reveals a paradox in its assump-
tion that museums are the places where the imagesor the artifactsof
70 S. SAK
CONCLUSION
The objective of this chapter was to provide an overview of studies inte-
grating socio-spatial approaches into digital media research, and to elabo-
rate on how the methods of media and communication research can be
enriched with socio-spatial approaches. The basis of this disposition is built
on the line of reasoning that the digital realm inherits a number of socio-
spatial attributes of physical spaces. Architectural and urban studies have
long been nourished by the acknowledgment of space as being socially
produced. As a fundamental feature of contemporary digital media, social
production of the digital realm is realized through social practices and
representational spaces, which are both proposed by Lefebvre (2007) as
components of social spaces. Consequently, various issues related to physi-
cal spaces can be observed in the digital realm, leading us to consider the
digital realm as a social space in research.
There is a body of research that focuses either on the cognitive processes
or on the social processes within the digital realm. Studies on cognitive
processes are related to the ways in which people experience and perceive
the digital realm, and adopt various methods of environmental and behav-
ioral studies. On the other hand, works on questions of social processes
question or explore how people form communities or cultural texts that
are traditionally accepted to be closely related to the spaces in which they
are formed. I believe that an overview of these studies can explain and
inspire merging of the approaches of socio-spatial and media research.
In the last part of the chapter, to extend the scope of superposition
of the virtual on the spatial for further research, I discuss the potential
of approaching the digital realm as a place of memory. This potential is
originated again on the spatiality of the digital realm. As the digital realm
embraces acts, tools, and objects of remembering just like physical spaces
do, such an integrative approach paves the way for evaluating and devel-
oping the digital realm for better articulation of digital spaces and there-
fore for better functioning of digital life, which is integral to contemporary
daily life. The discussion of socio-spatial approaches in this chapter aims at
encouraging the use and development of innovative methods for media and
communication research, and also at paving the way for comprehending the
significant influence of media on spatial practices for socio-spatial research.
72 S. SAK
NOTES
1. For a critique of Mark Deuzes argument, see Kubitschko and Knapp
(2012).
2. See Navigation, in Merriam-Webster dictionary; http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/navigation (accessed 10 January 2016).
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PART II
Technology
NoortjeMarres
N. Marres ()
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
76 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
various merits, but one of them surely is that they take experimental
inquiry into an opposite direction from the presumption that conducting
an experiment requires that the researcher control the setting and gain full
and complete access to the data. Rather, it is to pursue exploratory knowl-
edge through the active configuration and combination of networks, data,
feeds, and measures and by deploying the ongoing provocations of life in
technological societies in order to generate partial empirical objects.
CHAPTER 5
TainaBucher
T. Bucher ()
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
e-mail: [email protected]
What is interesting about Ashbys early writings is how the black box is
not necessarily presented as an obstacle, but simply as part of everyday
life. What early cyberneticians like him recognized is that the black box is
not an exception, but rather the norm.
We may see how the black box has become a metaphor for the secret,
hidden, and unknown. In everyday parlance, everything from the brain,
markets, and totalitarian nation-states is now conceptualized as a black
box. Algorithms are no different. The media routinely call algorithms
the secret sauces that make companies tick (Colett 2007; Kincaid 2010;
Oremus 2014; Vanhemert 2013). If the workings of algorithms are kept
behind veils of trade secrecy (Pasquale 2015, p.2), scholars worry that
algorithms cannot be held accountable or critically scrutinized. What hap-
pens when algorithms suddenly start to make discriminatory inferences
based on certain data sets and design decisions? The lack of transparency
and accountability of black box algorithms (Pasquale 2015) is funda-
mentally seen as a democratic problem. For Tufekci (2014), the opaque
algorithms of Facebook and Twitter have enormous consequences for
political speech as they determine the visibility of content and can be
changed at will. Because of the ways in which commercial platforms now
tailor and personalize content to individual users, the fear is that the
opacity of algorithms and private control of platforms alters the ability
of the public to understand what is ostensibly a part of the public sphere
(Tufekci 2014, p.9). What seems to be at stake is not only the regulatory
or political challenge related to algorithmic discrimination or the under-
mining of the public sphere. More fundamentally, our most trivial every-
day experiences are mediated, augmented, and conditioned by algorithms.
For Striphas (2010), what need critical scrutiny are the ways in which
algorithms increasingly measure and shape cultural taste. As he writes: I
dont fear the machine. What I do fear, though, is the black box of algo-
rithmic culture (Striphas 2010, n.p.).
While it is true that proprietary algorithms are hard to know, that does
not make them unknowable. There are many ways of knowing algorithms
(if broadly understood) besides opening the black box and reading the exact
coded instructions telling the machine what to do. Algorithms are not as
secretive as the metaphor of the black box makes them out to be. Indeed,
while some things are fundamentally not discoverable (von Hilgers 2011,
p.42), the widespread notion of algorithms as black boxes may prevent
research more than encouraging it. It seems to me that the metaphor of
the black box is too readily used as a way of critiquing algorithms, without
NEITHER BLACK NOR BOX: WAYS OFKNOWING ALGORITHMS 85
critically scrutinizing the metaphor itself. What is gained and what is lost
when we draw on the metaphor of the black box to describe algorithms?
To what extent does the metaphor work at all?
focusing on the notion that algorithms are black boxes grants them a
special place in the world of unknowns that perhaps is not fully deserved.
As Ashby recognized: In our daily lives we are confronted at every turn
with systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully open to inspection,
and which must be treated by the methods appropriate to the Black Box
(1956, p.86). Because opacity, secrecy, and invisibility are not epistemic
anomalies, but rather a basic condition of human life, the black box is not
something to be feared but something that corresponds to new insights
(von Hilgers 2011, p.32).
When confronted with a black box, the appropriate task for the experi-
menter, as Ashby(1956) saw it, is not necessarily to know exactly what is
inside the box, but to ask instead which properties can actually be discovered
and which remain undiscoverable. For Ashby and the early cyberneticians,
the black box was not an obstacle but a means for play and exploratory
experimentation (Kaerlein 2013, p.659). Speculative experimentation and
playing around with algorithms to figure out how they work should not
merely be reserved for hackers, gamers, spammers, and search engine opti-
mizers (SEO). In the spirit of reverse engineeringthe process of extracting
the knowledge or design blueprints from anything man-made (Eilam 2005,
p.3)media scholars might want to approach algorithms from the question
of how they work and their operational logics (Wardrip-Fruin 2009).
In my own research I have drawn on a mode of inquiry that I call
technography. Broadly speaking, I approach the complex ways in which
software intersects with sociality in a way that is similar to anthropologi-
cal methods of ethnography. This is to say that technography, as I use
the term, is a way of describing and observing technology in order to
examine the interplay between a diverse set of actors (both human and
non-human). In contrast to ethnography, with its focus on documenting
peoples beliefs and practices from the peoples own perspectives (Riemer
2009, p.205), technography has technology as its perspective; specifically,
the norms and values that have been delegated to and materialized in
technology. While the ethnographer seeks to understand culture primarily
through the meanings attached to the world by people, the technographic
inquiry starts by asking of what the software itself is suggestive.
Following Ashbys cybernetic lead, what is at stake in a technographic
inquiry is not to reveal some hidden truth about the exact workings of soft-
ware or to unveil the precise formula of an algorithm. Instead, the aim is to
develop a critical understanding of the mechanisms and operational logic
of software. To borrow from Galloway, the question is how it works and
NEITHER BLACK NOR BOX: WAYS OFKNOWING ALGORITHMS 87
who it works for (2004, p. xiii). Just as the ethnographer observes, takes
notes, and asks people about their beliefs and values, Ashbys observer
describes what he sees and what he think he sees. The researcher con-
fronted with the black box algorithm does not necessarily need to know
much about coding or programming. As Ashby points out, no skill is
called for! We are assuming, remember, that nothing is known about the
Box (1956, p. 89).2 Unlike the study of people, technology cannot be
asked about its beliefs and values. Again, this perceived limitation should
not hold us back from critically scrutinizing software. In order to explore
of what software seems suggestive, specific tricks have to be invented to
make [it] talk (Latour 2005, p.79). Both Ashby and Latour suggest pay-
ing attention to the kinds of information offered by objects as they relate
to an observer. Just as people become visible and intelligible by offer-
ing information and having their stories told, objects have to enter into
accounts in order to be accounted for (Latour 2005, p.79). Algorithms
enter into all kinds of account, which researchers may easily trace.
At the level of the interface, algorithms offer a description of them-
selves by the visual output of information they deliver. The content and
information we encounter as part of interfaces like the Facebook news
feed have already been carefully curated and formatted. As Galloway
points out, data have no necessary visual form (2011, p.88). What we
see, therefore, is never raw data, but data that have been put into a form
through a process of algorithmic in-formation. For the technographer,
the question becomes how exactly data are being put into new forms of
meaningfulness. Just as ethnographers assemble notes, interviews, and
observations into a new account of a cultural phenomenon, technogra-
phers build their account of algorithms by assembling information from
different sources. Confronted with ones own limited understanding of
an algorithm or algorithmic systems, the question is where does one go
to learn what one needs to know in order to understand more confi-
dently (Winner 1993, p.363)? In the case of the Facebook algorithm, a
researcher might want to consult the following sources and sites: patent
applications and similar documents that detail and lay out technical specifi-
cations, press releases, conference papers on machine learning techniques,
recorded documents from developer and engineering conferences, com-
pany briefs, media reports, blog posts, Facebooks initial public offering
(IPO) filing, and so on. Such a reading of technological mechanisms is
possible because various traces and semiotic systems cluster around techni-
cal artefacts and ensembles (Mackenzie 2002, p.211).
88 T. BUCHER
algorithms, I found that many users are in fact already aware of algorithms.
They encounter algorithms in all kinds of situations, from the recently pur-
chased Christmas gift that appears on the shared family computer as an ad
ruining the surprise, through to the almost forgotten friend who suddenly
reappears on the Facebook news feed after years of silence. The stories
that people tell about their experiences with algorithms suggest that algo-
rithms particularly reveal themselves in moments of disruption, surprise,
and breakdown. There is the whoa moment when people become aware
of being tracked and followed by the machine. There are the situations in
which people find themselves misplaced and wrongfully categorized by the
algorithm. There is the popularity game that many media-savvy users have
become accustomed to playing, trying to amend their behavior to better
fit the algorithmic logic in place. For researchers interested in understand-
ing the affective dimensions of algorithms, then, it might just be a matter
of where they go to look for these stories. Sometimes it is not a matter of
peeking inside the box, but getting behind the tweets.
of hands reaching into them, tweaking and tuning, swapping out parts
and experimenting with new arrangements (2013, p. 10). For Seaver,
the boxing of the box entails studying the ways in which algorithms are
developed, examining the logic that guides the hands (2013, p.10).
While there is much to be gained by studying the values and beliefs
that go into the making of algorithmic systems, the classic laboratory
study or developer ethnography is complicated by the fact that algo-
rithms today are increasingly based on machine learning techniques,
which means that algorithms themselves are continuously changing
and evolving.5 As Introna points out, the evolving nature of algorithms
means that even the representatives of Google and other organisations
respond that it is difficult to say exactly what it is what their algorithms
actually do (2016).
While algorithms may be blackboxed in the sense described by Latour,
they are far from stable configurations. Take the algorithm curating the
Facebook news feed. As with algorithmic systems in general, there is never
a guarantee that we will step into the same river twice, since the algo-
rithm is regularly tweaked, personalized, and subject to A/B testing. As
Gillespie suggests, the black box metaphor fails us here, as the work-
ings of the algorithm are both obscured and malleable (2014, p.178).
Indeed, if we only concentrate on opening the black box, as if simply a lid
stands between the algorithm and us, we risk missing the fundamentally
networked and entangled nature of algorithms. In a day and age where
algorithms are no longer simply programmed once and for all (if they ever
were), where they may adapt and change as a result of being exposed to
particular data sets and user input, what methods can we use to under-
stand these algorithms in becoming?
Part of the difficulty in examining algorithms as dynamic, mutable, and
entangled entities is locating them in the first place. As Gillespie (2014)
reminds us, algorithms are embedded in the lived world, part of infor-
mation infrastructures and standards, shaped by communities of practice,
trained on specific data sets, affected and driven by user data, which makes
it difficult, if not impossible, to single them out. Introna (2013) therefore
suggests examining algorithms as part of particular situated practices. The
critical task for Introna is to study why algorithms are incorporated into
specific practices and how these practices change as a result. For Latour
(1999), the critic should engage in forms of reverse blackboxing, identify-
ing the specific actors and processes that are made invisible in the process
of making the box appear as a stable and static entity. As the overhead
NEITHER BLACK NOR BOX: WAYS OFKNOWING ALGORITHMS 93
CONCLUSION
Let this be the general conclusion: for every epistemological challenge the
seemingly blackboxed algorithm poses, another productive methodologi-
cal route may open. The complex and messy nature of social reality is not
the problem. Just as algorithms constitute but one specific solution to a
computational problem, we cannot expect a single answer to the problem
of how to know algorithms. As has been suggested throughout this chap-
ter, perhaps knowing algorithms is not even the solution (see also Chun
2011 and Gillespie 2014). Still, and borrowing from Law, one thing is
sure: if we want to think about the messes of reality at all then were going
94 T. BUCHER
NOTES
1. I am paraphrasing tweets that I have used in a study on peoples perceptions
of algorithms (Bucher 2016). The original tweets have been slightly altered
to protect the participants privacy.
2. Although the black box demands no particular skill from the observer and
experimenter, there should be no doubt about the usefulness of developing
some form of procedural literacy with regard to interpreting the mecha-
nisms of software (see Montfort 2016).
3. According to Pietz (1985), fetishism historically emerged as a problem-idea
in the Portuguese colonial encounter with the West African Other during
the 16th and 17th centuries. Pietz (1988) remarks how the colonial
Enlightenment thinkers frequently observed that pre-modern Africans were
inclined to false causal reasoning about physical nature.
4. Fetishism has played a major role in Marxs theories on capitalist society as
well as in Freuds psychoanalytic interventions. For both of these thinkers,
the concept of the fetish takes as its starting point the phenomenon of sub-
stitution. For Marx, the commodity fetish is a substitution for peoples rela-
tionships to each other. To read more about his diagnosis of capital as fetish,
see Marx (1976). To read more about how Freud addresses the topic, see
Freud (1961).
5. Broadly speaking, machine learning refers to a subfield of computer science
concerned with computer programs that are able to learn from experience
and thus improve their performance over time (Surden 2014, p. 89).
Machine learning algorithms challenge some deeply ingrained ideas about
agency, as they are not only able to improve performance, but also create an
internal computer model of a given phenomenon that can be generalized to
apply to new, never-before-seen examples of that phenomenon (Surden
2014, p.93) without being explicitly programmed to do so.
REFERENCES
Anderson, C. (2013) Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic
Journalism. New Media & Society 15(7): 100521.
Ashby, W. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall).
Beer, D. (2009) Power Through the Algorithm? Participatory Web Cultures and
the Technological Unconscious. New Media & Society 11(6): 9851002.
Bucher, T. (2016) The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects
of Facebook Algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20(1):
3044.
Bucher, T. (2012) Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of
Invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society 14(7): 116480.
96 T. BUCHER
PabloR.Velasco
P.R. Velasco ()
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
or laptop, but the resources are still in the ledger, and as long as she keeps
a copy of her secret keys, which are a cryptographically developed form of
identification, her satoshis (the smallest possible unit of a Bitcoin) can be
reclaimed. The lightweight node approves transactions to be made to the
ledger, but neither makes the changes nor helps in distributing the trans-
mission of transactions. A full node, on the other hand, is responsible for
the relay and validation of blocks of transactions, and its resources provide
storage and bandwidth for the networks upkeep (FAQ Bitcoin 2015).
Unlike traditional registry administration, here the ledger is legion. Every
full node contains a copy of it (with no original) and validates its transac-
tions. These are the structural skeleton of the network and the condition
of possibility for users and transactions, therefore playing a crucial role in
the endurance of the digital phenomenon of distributed cryptocurrencies.
Interestingly, nodes do not need to be users of cryptocurrencies: they can
help the network without ever receiving or sending Bitcoins (unlike min-
ers, nodes receive no economic stimulus for a severely machine-demanding
job). At the time of writing, the blockchain weighs over 30 gigabytes
synchronization requires significant bandwidth and energy, considering
that it has an effect on the network only when it is connected. Miners are
a kind of node specialized in collecting new transactions into blocks and
require specific hardware and working conditions to do so; given their
particular role in the Bitcoin ecosystem, I differentiate them from regular
nodes. The distinctions I am making can be summarized as follows: (1) a
node1 is not necessarily a user of the Bitcoin currency; (2) a user (or light-
weight node) of the Bitcoin currency is not necessarily a node; (3) a node
is not necessarily a miner; but (4) every miner is a node.
It is possible to set up a Bitcoin server to act as a listener to other
broadcasting nodes. The Bitnodes website, supported by the Bitcoin
Foundation, provides an application programming interface (API) for a
server of this kind,2 which makes it possible to retrieve a limited amount
of information about the network at any moment. With the intention
of achieving an overall observation of the networks behavior, I set up a
machine that continually collects and stores this information from it.
In order to keep the data as complete as possible, the scripts run on
a low-cost, dedicated Raspberry Pi that is permanently connected to the
internet. The retrieval of information is done by a simple script that makes
a request for the hostname of the server, country code, city, latitude, lon-
gitude, time zone, internet service provider (ISP), user agent, height, last
connections, and protocol version, from every node connected to the
SKETCHING BITCOIN: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OFDIGITAL AFFORDANCES 107
network. This simple Python script retrieves new snapshots of the whole
network every five minutes. New snapshot data is time stamped and stored
in a separated json-formatted file, for later retrieval. Every snapshot can be
read as a static moment of an ever-changing map of the physical network,
containing all the node locations forming the network at that moment.
Gathering around 160190 snapshots per day allows me to zoom in on how
the network changes on a daily basis and over stretched durations. Through
more Python scripts I generated sets from this data that were not evident or
immediately retrievable through the Bitnodes API.
Using a second Python script, I queried and produced sets of strong,
weak, and ghost nodes, being the machines that have been part of the
Bitcoin network uninterruptedly, interruptedly, and for less than one day,
respectively, during a certain time span. This allows me to propose catego-
ries of commitment or interest directly related to geographic zones. Full
nodes for keeping the network healthy are becoming scarcer and scarcer;
support for the network has decayed since its high point at the end of
2013. There is even an incentive program that provides a monthly amount
of money to nodes that accomplish certain criteria to be considered highly
healthy peers. Following this thread, I observe and classify different degrees
of commitment, as an indicator based on continuity: I consider strong nodes
those who are connected at every moment of the sample, ghost nodes those
who are connected in less than 10 % of the moments in the sample, and
nine levels of weak nodes, weak9 being nodes present in 9099 % of the
sample, weak8 those present in 8089 %, and so on. Strong and weak
nodes are a minority in the sample network, which is mostly formed of
ghosts (see Fig. 6.1). The broader the sample, the more predominant the
ghosts become. As Fig. 6.2 shows, an extended sample considers 1317
continuous snapshots (around a week of data) from which a mere 4.3 % of
nodes are strong, a small sum compared to 69.4 % of ghost nodes.
The hierarchization of nodes serves as a bedrock for an initial analysis
of the geographic characteristics of the network. However, it is important
to note that the mere data collection and simple categorization of the data
have already created an implicit research contract that defines the range
of use of the data. This is not restricted to information on nodes within
distributed cryptocurrencies, but encompasses the number of digital
objects used in digital research. Digital devices, as objects of research and as
methodological tools, not only are able to change sociality and knowledge
(Ruppert etal. 2013, p.22), but are also expressions of an epistemology
developed within instrumental assemblages. The origin of the information
108 P.R. VELASCO
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
strongs weak 9 weak 8 weak 7 weak 6 weak 5 weak 4 weak 3 weak 2 weak 1 ghosts
Fig. 6.1 Distribution of strong, weak, and ghost nodes from a random sample of
fifteen snapshots of the network between March and May 2015. Pablo
R.Velasco
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
0
strongs weak 9 weak 8 weak 7 weak 6 weak 5 weak 4 weak 3 weak 2 weak 1 ghosts
Fig. 6.2 Distribution of strong, weak, and ghost nodes from a sample of 1317
snapshots of the network from the last week of 2014. Pablo R.Velasco
SKETCHING BITCOIN: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OFDIGITAL AFFORDANCES 109
(the grammar), the intentions that guide the creation of the frameworks
used with this grammar (the development), and the multiplication of meth-
ods in future epistemological directives are already embedded in the many
manifestations of the digital objects. Both the device (the server, acting as
a node), the instructions for retrieval and distillation (the scripts), and the
data (the information for each node and snapshot) are considered natively
digital (Rogers 2009). This means that they are subject to pre-defined
categories, specificities, definitions, and interactions that are implicit and
may not even be evident. That is, an unavoidable computational ontol-
ogy comes with the use of many digital objects, with its own rules, logic,
and grammara set of unitary actions of human activities represented in
computation (Agre 1994). The researcher working with digital methods
is forced, by platforms and medium-specific inheritances, to become an
analyzer and a distiller: data collection becomes extraction, and the making
of knowledge, distillation (Marres and Weltevrede 2013). The different
steps involved in the creation of the node map are soaked in this grammar.
First, API calls offer a limited set of a priori formatted categories and
definitions for the possible data. Characteristics of the node object exist
within this logic. While protocol version is an existing category of this kind
of entityit is a relevant piece of information for the effective functioning
of the networkthe political stance of the node owner or the general incen-
tives for keeping this node running are not machine relevant. Traditionally
important categories for social research may not appear, in part because
this device was not designed for this kind of information retrieval, but also
because social categories are not part of most technical grammars. Then,
scraping data from the Bitcoin network involves medium-specific limita-
tions, analytic assumptions alien to social research, and an inherent risk
of importing inquiry categories into our own (Marres and Weltevrede
2013). The same applies to the distillation process, which is also produced
by code categories. While coding in general has broad and creative out-
comes, it is also the manifestation of a system of thoughtan expression
on how the world can be captured, represented, processed and modeled
computationally with the outcome subsequently of doing work in the
world (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, p.26).
Permutations within digital grammar are also not neutral. They are cre-
ated with deliberate intentions and goals. Digital transactional data and
algorithms are not usually designed with the purposes of social research-
ers in mind. Although some cases are inherited from academic logics (for
example, page rank and citation schemes; see Beer 2012), the mold cases
110 P.R. VELASCO
for the data allocation are made to and from quite different perspectives. At
this point Facebook data scientists have access to what is probably the larg-
est ever concentration of social interaction data and metadata (contents,
actors, relations), and while their methodological behavior can resemble
that of the social researcher, their ends and aims are most certainly focused
on another chain of intentions, and framed by specific systems of thought,
political economies, and politics (Kitchin 2016). Examples might be pro-
viding a better experience for the user to enhance the business, in order to
improve its marketing performance or even create new products (Gerlitz
and Helmond 2013; Cusumano and Goeldi 2013), like Facebooks
Messenger or Twitters Periscope. Similar sets of digital techniques and
tools for research are used with dissimilar intentions.
Digital methods are easily transformed into epistemological data; it has
been argued that what defines the digital is not its new technical possibilities,
but the actual transmutation and multiplication of methods (Mackenzie
and McNally 2013). According to this idea, digital methods do not only
display data about something in the world, but turn this production into
data about how things are known, data that can get dissolved into other
digital devices. Multiplied methods become data themselves. The former
methodological description shows more about what we are allowed to
apprehend via our own methods than about how exactly machines are
distributed in the world. Even though it does shows the latter, from a
methodological point of view the importance of the mapping resides in
the epistemological highlighting of relations; that is to say, what the loca-
tion of machines says about how a broader ecosystem is understood. The
very process of localization builds on what we think we can know of this
ecosystem. Methods relying on data manipulation replicate this grammar
and, in doing so, influence potential epistemologies for future objects.
It is important to take this into account while observing the outcomes of
these digital methodologies: a small territorial look at the Bitcoin system.
Fig. 6.3 Map of strong (red), weak (blue), and ghost (gray) nodes from a ran-
dom sample of fifteen moments of the network between March and May 2015.
This map can be thoroughly explored at: https://timeknows.cartodb.com/
viz/7b8e0d76-edb2-11e4-a3b1-0e43f3deba5a/embed_map (accessed 9 January
2016). Image and data: Pablo R.Velasco. Template: OpenStreetMap con-
tributors CartoDB, CartoDB attribution
connect to the network just to make a transaction but without the intention
of continually preserving its infrastructure.4 It is feasible to argue that a
significant number of ghost and weak nodes are zombie machines, espe-
cially in geographic areas of low-cost bots (Huang et al. 2014). Strong
nodes, on the other hand, are scarce but solid. Given the range of time and
schedule of the sample, it is highly unlikely that they have unwilling opera-
tors. These nodes have been connected uninterruptedly, and thus are, for
whichever reason, resolute supporters of the network. It is reasonable to
assume that a great part of them can also be considered miners and benefit
economically from their role.
It can be observed (see Fig. 6.3) that the weak and ghosts usually
encircle the strong regions, providing a map of interest where urban areas
produce stronger nodes, encircled predominantly by less interested parties
in concentric rural areas. For example, London is clearly a comfortable
niche for strong nodes, and its surrounding suburban areas are populated
with weak and ghost nodes, therefore showing an urban and highly local-
ized community of network upholders, and a stronger commitment to
the network situated in the north of Europe. A point of departure to
112 P.R. VELASCO
have a rational reading of the map must obviously consider that a great
percentage of black areas (for example, Russia) are not inhabited or do
not have distributed internet access. Therefore, black rural areas and high-
lighted urban centers are expected.
The great majority of strong nodes inhabit the USA and the north
of Europe, and on a minor scale the east coast of Asia. This proves that
the global network is in reality a very localized phenomenon, with only
a fistful of nodes in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. A closer
regional look (see Figs. 6.4 and 6.5) shows that most of the strong nodes
in Europe belong to the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands,
but again, few can be considered committed in Spain, Portugal, and the
whole region of the Balkans. It shows that unlike other emerging payment
and value-storage systems like M-Pesa (Jack and Suri 2011), Bitcoin is a
phenomenon whose network support resides in the north. It adds up to
the majority of web technologies sustaining the Digital Divide Cartogram
(Lovink and Zehle 2005, pp.1101), which depicts a map where coun-
tries sizes are inversely proportional to their internet usage, showing a
world bloated in the south (with some exceptions). Updated maps that
also consider the proportion of internet users show that this digital divide
remains (Graham etal. 2012). It is not surprising that regions with a high
Fig. 6.4 Strong nodes in the world. Image and data: Pablo R. Velasco.
Template: OpenStreetMap contributors CartoDB, CartoDB attribution
SKETCHING BITCOIN: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OFDIGITAL AFFORDANCES 113
Fig. 6.5 Detail view of strong nodes in Europe. Image and data: Pablo
R. Velasco. Template: OpenStreetMap contributors CartoDB, CartoDB
attribution
number of internet users are also hosts of many strong nodes. However, it
is interesting to see that regions with a high percentage of internet users
are not necessarily the ones with the biggest percentage of strong nodes
(see Fig. 6.6). Canada, the Czech Republic, Australia, France, Germany,
Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland show a
considerable number of network users when considering their population
of internet users.
Although crucial for its functioning, the map of the network shows only
a minimal part of the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. In order to obtain a more
comprehensive geography, other kinds of agencies must be added: the
legal position of countries, indigenous markets, and mining concentration
in the network. Digital objects and digital methodologies produce new
subjectivities, whether deliberately, like administrators of social sites shap-
ing their own users (Gehl 2014), or with the mere use of computational
114 P.R. VELASCO
Fig. 6.6 Percentage (in red) of strong nodes and percentage (in blue) of internet
users (Internet Live Statistics) by country. (Internet Live Statistics (2015) ranks
the total number of internet users by country based on statistical analysis from dif-
ferent sources: the International Telecommunication Unions Measuring the
Information Society Report, the World Bank Groups Internet Users Data, the
Central Intelligence Agencys World Factbook, and data from the United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs). Pablo R.Velasco
40.00%
35.00%
% of World Internet Users % of Strong nodes
P.R. VELASCO
30.00%
25.00%
20.00%
15.00%
10.00%
5.00%
0.00%
l l l
na ca ia an zi ia ny m ce ea ia m ly in da nd ca ne ds ia an m en lic nd ry lia a ce ng e rk nd ay us ia ia re ia ria nd nd tia ca ia ia ia va ia rg ia nd ze an ia nd
hi ri nd p ra ss a o n r es a Ita Spa na ola Afri rai lan an hst lgiu ed ub rla nga tra rtug ree ko Isra ma nla rw lar nis erb apo vak lga ala ela roa Ri uan atv ven ldo ton bou lays ela eli iw don ila
C me I Ja B Ru rm ingd Fra Ko on ietn a k r m p e s u a
f A G
e k
u th Ind V C P th U the Ro zak Be Sw Re itz Hu Au Po G ong
u D
en Fi No Be T S ing Slo Bu Ze Ir C sta ith L Slo Mo Es em Ma Ic B T ce Tha
o L a
o d e h w H S C x M
te So So N Ka ec S ew Lu
t es ni z N
ta U C
S
d
te
ni
U
Fig. 6.7 Geography of a Bitcoin ecosystem, including country legislation status on Bitcoin (restrictive in red, cautious in
yellow, and permissive green tones), strong nodes (red points), markets (blue points, sized by market share). (This map can
be thoroughly explored at: https://timeknows.cartodb.com/viz/00ba6572-111b-11e5-b43e-0e018d66dc29/embed_
map (accessed 9 January 2016)). Image and data: Pablo R. Velasco. Template: OpenStreetMap contributors
CartoDB, CartoDB attribution
SKETCHING BITCOIN: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OFDIGITAL AFFORDANCES 117
CONCLUSIONS
As with many new digital objects, the emergence of Bitcoin generates an
opportunity to produce new methodologies. Specific research paths can
emerge from what the affordances of novel digital objects bring up and
redistribute among other social science research methodologies, obeying
the argued distributed nature of social research in online environments
(Marres 2012). Agencies modeled by digital methods, like strong nodes,
inherit attributes from the digital logic of their digital devices, in most
cases unavoidably. Then, digital research must consider the implicit con-
tract of working with entities derived from computational sources, espe-
cially when tied to extraction and distillation techniques.
Law and Ruppert (2013, p.239) pose an open question on how the
dynamics of methods that are shaped by the social that work to format
the social, and that are used opportunistically, intersect with each other.
Far from attempting to answer such an elusive interrogation, I would add
to it that the awareness of current computational epistemologies and an
acknowledged intention of the researcher to restructure the social are key
to identifying the opportunistic shaping of society: how devices collect,
communicate, and store data; how their grammar belongs inevitably to
social and political institutions; and how their usage directly reinforces a
kind of knowledge articulated by the devices own logic. Consequently,
methods should be used and designed taking this into consideration and
highlight aspects of the device that are less constrained by computational
SKETCHING BITCOIN: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH OFDIGITAL AFFORDANCES 119
NOTES
1. Henceforth, by nodes I will refer to full nodes unless otherwise stated.
2. The code and instructions to set up a forked server are available at https://
github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes (accessed 10 January 2016). The informa-
tion gathered by the API is, however, the same as that gathered by setting
up a personalized version of the server.
3. OpenStreetMap contributors CartoDB attribution (https://cartodb.
com/).
4. As far as I know, there is no way to know whether a node is the public inter-
face of more than one machine, for example a mining rig. Also, nodes may be
hijacked computers, as this is common practice both inside and outside the
Bitcoin network (Litke and Stewart 2014; Huang etal. 2014), and evidently
should not be considered as strong supporters. However, there is no guaran-
teed way to identify hijacked nodes, due to Bitcoin protocol restrictions.
5. Most of this data comes originally from a Regulation Report of 2014
(Global Legal Research Directorate 2014), which has been partly updated.
6. Market data was obtained via databitcoin.org. It shows the market volume
share of Bitcoins, from 19 January to 19 June 2015.
REFERENCES
Agre, P. (1994) Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy. The Information
Society 10(2): 10127.
Androulaki, E., Karame, G., Roeschlin, M., etal. (2013) Evaluating User Privacy
in Bitcoin. In A.-R.Sadeghi (Ed.), Financial Cryptography and Data Security
(Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), pp.3451.
Baumann, A., Fabian, B. and Lischke, M. (2014) Exploring the Bitcoin Network.
Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems
and Technologies (Barcelona), pp.36974.
120 P.R. VELASCO
RichardHuskey
R. Huskey ()
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
NEURAL CONNECTIVITY
Connectivity can be broken down into three subcategories: structural
connectivity, functional connectivity, and effective connectivity (Friston
2011). Structural connectivity is concerned with the white-matter fiber
tracts that connect different brain structures, and it is structural connec-
tivity that enables different brain regions to work together. Cognitive
processes modulate the strength of neuronal connections between brain
BEYOND BLOBOLOGY: USING PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL INTERACTION... 127
PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS
The primary utility of PPI analysis is an investigation into task-modulated
functional connectivity. The analysis itself is based on two fundamental
principles of neural activity (Friston etal. 1997). First, neural activity in
two or more regions is correlated when these regions are working together.
The second principle is that a task should modulate the strength of the
correlation between two regions of interest (ROIs). It is this second idea
that is central to PPI analysis. One benefit of PPI is that the underlying
mathematical principles are relatively easy to understand for researchers
who are already familiar with standard statistics and fMRI analyses based
on the general linear model (GLM). There are three steps for conducting
a basic PPI analysis: select a seed ROI, extract the neural time series data
for that ROI, and define a GLM (OReilly etal. 2012).
ROI Selection
PPI analyses are highly hypothesis driven (Friston et al. 1997). The
first step in any PPI analysis is to identify a seed ROI that is thought to
exert task-dependent influence over target ROIs (OReilly et al. 2012).
There are three strategies for seed selection. The first selects a seed ROI
based on anatomical or theoretical models. Large-scale meta-analyses of
connectivity data may be particularly useful here (see, for example, the
online platform http://neurosynth.org and Richardet et al. 2015). A
second approach selects a seed ROI based on a previous GLM analysis;
this is known as a functionally defined ROI (fROI).1 A final approach
selects a seed ROI based on exploratory analysis, such as an independent
component analysis (ICA).
BEYOND BLOBOLOGY: USING PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL INTERACTION... 129
Defining aGLM
The final step in a basic PPI analysis is to define a general linear model
(OReilly et al. 2012). The simplest GLM includes three regressors (or
explanatory variables, EVs): a psychological EV, a physiological EV, and
an interaction term. The psychological EV (PSY) is the task sequence
130 R. HUSKEY
Other Considerations
One limitation inherent to PPI analyses is that the analysis is often lacking
in statistical power (OReilly etal. 2012). This limits the potential for type
I error, but is problematic in that a PPI analysis may be less sensitive for
detecting functional connectivity. One reason for this is that, in the simple
model defined earlier, the PSY and PHYS regressors may be correlated,
thus making it difficult to detect the interaction due to the presence of
main effects (Friston et al. 1997). The interaction term of interest can
only account for variance above and beyond that which is explained by
the main effects (Cohen etal. 2003). One possible solution is to design
a study that utilizes a block design, as this approach has been shown to
provide increased power compared to event-related designs (Chee etal.
2003; Cisler etal. 2014).
One final approach for increasing statistical power and reducing error is
known as generalized PPI (gPPI; McLaren etal. 2012).3 The main differ-
ence from a standard PPI (sPPI; the simplified procedure with just three
BEYOND BLOBOLOGY: USING PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL INTERACTION... 131
EVs already described) is that a gPPI models an EV for each factor in the
experimental design, instead of modeling one EV that encodes all experi-
mental factors. An interaction term is then modeled for each factor. By
increasing the number of parameters in the model, the gPPI essentially
allows for the decomposition of the interaction term and a more direct
comparison of functional connectivity between task conditions. In simu-
lation and real-world data, McLaren et al. (2012) demonstrate that the
gPPI improves model fit and potentially reduces both type I and type
II error. When compared to sPPI analyses, gPPI analyses are particularly
more powerful for event-related designs, although they are comparably
powerful for block designs (Cisler etal. 2014). Unfortunately, one com-
plication of gPPI is that the higher number of terms increases the difficulty
of beta-weight interpretation (McLaren etal. 2012).
The previous paragraph suggests that PPI analyses might be subject to
type I error. OReilly etal. (2012) demonstrate how failing to include all
sources of task-related variance in the model can contribute to spurious
results. As an example, they describe a hypothetical experiment where sub-
jects navigate a maze while undergoing fMRI scanning. In such an experi-
ment, subjects might stop to strategize the next move, turn a corner, navigate
a straight path, or finish the maze. In an analysis where each maze run, start
to finish, was modeled in a block design, certain events, such as turning a
corner or finishing the maze, might trigger a spike in neural activity, which
boosts the BOLD signal, but not in the sustained manner that the block
design assumes. Increasing model specificity (for example, a gPPI) might be
one method for mitigating this concern, but this example also suggests that
researchers should carefully consider whether a block design is an adequate
fit for their assumptions about neural activity. Like any fMRI study, subject
ability, attention, learning, and exhaustion might influence neural activity.
Finally, PPI analyses are typically based on a linear application of the
GLM. However, it is well known that many neural processes are non-
linear (Friston etal. 2000), and the presence of a non-linear relationship
between seed and target ROIs might drive spurious PPI results (OReilly
etal. 2012). There are possible solutions for dealing with non-linear rela-
tionships in a PPI analysis (for an extended discussion, see Harrison and
Friston 2004). In one example, Weber etal. (2014a) add a quadratic term
to account for non-linearities in the data. Their PPI model is as follows:
B 1 PSY 2 PHYS 3 PSY 4 PSY 2 PHYS 0 .
132 R. HUSKEY
PPI Utility
PPI analyses have a number of benefits that make them well suited for test-
ing synchronization theory. First, unlike exploratory methods such as ICA,
PPIs are highly hypothesis driven. Synchronization theory offers explicit
hypotheses concerning which alerting, orientating, and reward structures
are likely involved in flow (see Weber etal. 2009), and many of these predic-
tions see preliminary support among early brain-mapping investigations of
flow (Huskey etal. 2014; Klasen etal. 2012; Ulrich etal. 2014). Together,
these studies provide a strong foundation for selecting relevant seed ROIs
that allow for direct tests of the theorys main hypotheses.
PPIs are also useful for extending our understanding of how synchroni-
zation theory works. In their 2009 paper, Weber and colleagues theorize
that flow is the emergent property of a synchronization between attentional
and reward networks. However, they do not specify the direction of influ-
ence between these structures. Recent neuroscientific results indicate that
the reward value of a stimulus predicts activation in structures associated
with alerting attention (for example, Stanisor etal. 2013). This suggests
that neural activity in reward networks might exert influence over atten-
tional networks during flow. PPI analyses would be useful for investigating
this as yet untested hypothesis. My collaborators and I are actively conduct-
ing work in this area and our initial results are proving promising. Finally,
a PPI analysis paves the way for more sophisticated techniques such as
those that use graph theoretical approaches for understanding whole-brain
connectivity patterns between cognitive states (see Gu etal. 2015).
NOTES
1. Importantly, fROIs should be defined independently of the task under
investigation in order to prevent artificially inflated results (see Weber etal.
2015b).
2. There are several deconvolution algorithms that can be implemented in
both SPM and AFNI (National Institute of Mental Health; https://afni.
nimh.nih.gov/afni, accessed on 10 August 2016). By comparison, FSL does
not have a built-in deconvolution algorithm.
3. An SPM toolbox for conducting gPPI analyses is available here: http://www.
nitrc.org/projects/gppi. FSL is also capable of conducting gPPI analyses.
BEYOND BLOBOLOGY: USING PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL INTERACTION... 135
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138 R. HUSKEY
AlbertoFrigo
A. Frigo ()
Sdertrn University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
More than half a century earlier, a young Friedrich Nietzsche (1980 [1874])
had already realized how knowledge overflow was becoming an obstacle
to renewing societal constellations in Germany at that time. The fascistic
answer to this, a drastic cleansing of the old for the sake of a new social integ-
rity, had self-destructive effects. Having directly experienced such effects,
namely the full course of modern warfare, it was now Bush, the leading
American scientist of his time, who proposed a new way of dealing with
knowledge overflow. The alternative was no longer a drastic bundling of
the overflow into one dogmatic view imposed by a regime. The American
alternative to dealing with the increasing overflow in a non-dictatorial fash-
ion was based on a visionary technology meant to implement the cognitive
faculties of individuals. This technology, which Bush named the Memex,
was supposed to assist users in their process of collecting and retrieving
information, enhancing not only their working space but most particularly
their head via a head-mounted camera (Fig. 8.1).
AS WESHOULD THINK? LIFELOGGING ASARE-EMERGING METHOD 141
Fig. 8.1 The interplay between desktop computing and wearable computing:
my failed attempts to wear cameras in order to document my life along with my
mental processes such as my thoughts and my dreams. At that time, in early 2000,
I was not aware of Vannevar Bushs article nor of wearable computers. Social
media did not exist and sousveillance for me was simply an intellectual necessity.
Alberto Frigo
The criticism that has arisen both in public opinion and in various academic
fields has only vaguely addressed where the exact threat of an all-capturing
and totally instrumentalizing device lies (Sellen and Whittaker 2010). It is
clear to me that this threat consists not so much in the act of systematically
documenting reality, but rather in delegating this task to an intelligent
system. Namely, the threat lies in the automation of the process of captur-
ing, organizing, and retrieving (or, better, in the case of these lifelogging
gadgets sharing) the reality of the user. Sensors and algorithms make up
the artificial intelligence, turning users into a mere Pinocchio guided by
a Jiminy Cricket, a lifelogging device instructing them on how to behave
for the sake of contemporary capitalist culture. Therefore, in the worst yet
most likely scenarioperhaps depending on whether the device was pur-
chased or given away for freethe lifelogging device will turn into a Cat
and a Fox examining the captured data and directing Pinocchio to plant
his golden coins in the garden of the miracles, the new economy.
At this point, scholars of the world should feel relaxedthey ought not
to go around wearing clumsy devices, nor ought they to face the increasing
complexity of the world as Bush had wished them to. The old canons and
archaic notions that scholars keep recycling can still be perfectly applicable
with a bit of tweaking. Additional notions, borrowed from other fields,
can also be applied, allowing a certain set of understandings that might
provide more or less predictable results and might result in a more gen-
eral discourse befitting the genre of academic mannerism. Avoiding the
pursuit of any criticism on pre-configured academic manners and methods
and the constant battle to put more or less emphasis on one or the other,
this chapter pursues Bushs idea, but from a different, more historically
elaborated perspective.
What seems fallacious at this point is to consider Bushs vision in terms of
automation. A scientist wearing a device configured to capture, organize,
and retrieve data automatically will replace the very human scientist if not
completely, at least partially. As data themselves seem to become too com-
plex for a human brain to deal with, programs in the near future will in fact
take up this role, considerably reducing the role of the scientist to some
kind of data hermeneutic and black-box scavenger. Now, my idea is simple
and implies the creation of a personal lifelogging framework to gather,
process, and retrieve information without the aid of purposely created
144 A. FRIGO
ROSETTA STONING
As I have so far presented it, lifelogging can be conceived not as a black box
of ourselves in the context of the mega-black boxes pervading contemporary
life, but rather a way to establish a combination of empathy and confronta-
tion with the opaque mechanisms and procedures affecting our everyday,
resulting in a Rosetta stone, or, as we shall shortly see, a mental architecture
146 A. FRIGO
Fig. 8.2 The personal museum of the humanist Ferrante Imperatoan inspiring
setting to let us think about the human black box that each researcher could
deliver, processing information with effort via a lifelogging framework and map-
ping it onto a structure like this room. Public domain work of art available at:
http://www.ausgepackt.uni-erlangen.de/presse/download/museum_des_
imperato.jpg (accessed 10 March 2016)
life, on the metro, at home, and with friends or even better while traveling.
By doing so, slowly this awareness will move into the background, allow-
ing you to become more natural in your tracking.
By doing so, after only a month it will also be clear what streams of
information befit your nature. Try to identify them clearly; work out a
possible system that allows you to log the reality within and around you,
sticking to the main streams of recurrences that you have identified. Try
to express also the most subconscious aspects of yourself, like your dreams
and imagination, and find ways to represent them in an ongoing manner.
Allow a good deal of serendipity in the overall process of documentation
and simplify what seems too awkward and time consuming to document.
Let time design and embed lifelogging in your behavior!
alone can allow you to reflect on it. You capture therefore you are! Soon
enough, however, you will experience the fact that the ever more estab-
lished frameworks projected onto society by corporations and institutions
are constantly trying to attract you into their caves. Interestingly, now you
have created an alternative place from which you can anchor one of your
feet while immersing yourself with your logging device into such engulf-
ing systems. Attempt to introduce your system within these other systems
and analyze the black-out or black hole that you can potentially create.
professor at that time. On presenting my scheme, the old man took out
his pen and crossed it through. During this early period I kept experi-
menting with various technologies to allow me to continuously record
and annotate my life. Not only was I too clumsy in setting up a proper
system, it also became too overwhelming to constantly have to deal with
always-on devices recording long chunks of, for example, video. It was
out of this frustration that I decided to go light and developed a system
to symbolize certain thoughts and events rather than to describe them in
full (see the resulting online archive at http://2004-2040.com). Rather
than slaughtering technologies literally to customize them on myself, I
therefore started a more successful practice of using off-the-shelf devices
and being very basic, capturing only specific things at specific times.
Now, twelve years later, I have my scheme up and running. My basic
tactic was to start with myself, creating a record of all my activities by
photographing every object that my right hand uses (I started this on 24
September 2003, a few months before lifelogging pioneer Gordon Bell
started wearing his automatic camera). From myself, I slowly developed
a framework gradually embracing the reality around me. At this point in
time I am conducting thirty-six projects simultaneously and I will do so
until 2040, when a 12 12 meter calendar depicting 1,000,000 activities
will have been accomplished.
AS WESHOULD THINK? LIFELOGGING ASARE-EMERGING METHOD 155
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I wish to bring forward lifelogging as a possible way in
which scholars should start thinking about knowledge production, step-
ping back from the industrialized way of patenting academic methods.
I encourage new scholars to attempt to deal individually with the craft-
ing of their own framework to capture, organize, and retrieve (or bet-
ter, elaborate) their personal realities. Such crafted frameworks become
particularly relevant at a time in which other digital frameworks such as
those of social media have taken the upper hand. I claim these frame-
works to be augmenting not the intelligentsia, but rather the dementia of
a population no longer able to decide for itself, instead constantly having
to check on its quantifying gadget as a new sort of confessionary priest at
hand, whose only purpose is monetary. While at first glance self-crafted
frameworks might seem narcissistic and/or asocial, in my experience they
actually develop a strong empathy for the world surrounding the active
observer, enforcing on them a common sense that gets altered in more
openly philanthropic enterprises.
156 A. FRIGO
The result is not an answer to a problem, but a system that can pro-
vide a myriad of hints from which a problem can be analyzed. It is
thus producing a basis for open interpretations that are able to provide
dynamic truths about reality. In this respect, lifelogging as a method
can be thought of as a way to deal with constantly increasing com-
plexity and transforming surroundings by proactively involving the
researcher. It should not be misunderstood as or diminished to an artis-
tic methodology, but rather be a meta-scientific effort going far beyond
158 A. FRIGO
REFERENCES
Adams, T., Holman Jones, S. and Ellis, C. (2014) Autoethnography, Understanding
Qualitative Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Aurelio, M. (1980) Pensieri (Milan: Mondadori).
Ashby, W. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall).
Bell, G., Gemmell, J.Lueder, R., etal. (2002) MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex
Vision. Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Multimedia (New York,
USA), pp.2358.
Bush, V. (1945) As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly 176(July): 1018.
Hodges, S., Williams, L., Berry, E., et al. (2006) SenseCam: A Retrospective
Memory Aid. In P.Dourish and A.Friday (Eds.), UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous
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Goodall, H. L. (2004) Narrative Ethnography as Applied Communication
Research. Journal of Applied Communication Research 32(3): 18594.
Kluitenberg, E. (2006) Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the
Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers).
Rossi, P. (1983) Clavis Universalis: Arti della Memoria e Logica Combinatoria da
Lullo a Leibniz (Bologna: Mulino).
Bacon, F. (1962 [1623]) The Advancement of Learning [De augmentis scien-
tiarum] (London and NewYork: Dent).
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press).
Mann, S. (1997) Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging
Cybersquare. Computer 30(2): 2532.
Manovich, L. (1999) Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence 5(2): 8090.
Nietzsche, F. (1980 [1874]) On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for
Life (Cambridge: Hackett Classics).
Rhodes, B. and Starner, T. (1996) Remembrance Agent: A Continuously Running
Automated Information Retrieval System. Proceedings of the 1st International
Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent
Technology (PAAM 96), pp.48795.
AS WESHOULD THINK? LIFELOGGING ASARE-EMERGING METHOD 159
Experience
SarahPink
DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY
Ethnography is one of the most established research approaches for doing
research with and about people, their experiences, everyday activities,
relationships, material cultures, social environments, and more spectacu-
lar events or performances. Ethnographers have long since worked with
media, both as a research method, as a research topic, and perhaps most
importantly as something that we acknowledge is an almost inevitable and
universal element of everyday life. As digital technologies are increasingly
ubiquitous in everyday life, as well as in the more extraordinary events and
activities in which people become involved, then it becomes important to
do research in a way that accounts for this, even if it does not necessar-
ily put the digital at the center of the study. While the three chapters in
this part show how ethnographic methods can be fruitfully employed on
film, multi-media political practices, and mobile technologies, this short
introduction focuses on digital ethnography as an emerging and influen-
tial subfield.
As my colleagues from the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and
I have noted in Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Pink etal.
2016), there is no single definition of ethnography, therefore it would
S. Pink ()
RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
162 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
NOTES
1. For this and the websites mentioned subsequently, see: http://johnpostill.
com, https://sites.google.com/site/mobilisingmediainthepacific/research-
from-the-field, http://locatingthemobile.net, and http://energyanddigi-
talliving.com (all accessed 10 March 2016).
REFERENCES
Boellstorff, T. (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Hine, C. (2015) Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday
(London: Bloomsbury).
Horst, H. and Miller, D. (Eds.) (2012) Digital Anthropology (London: Berg).
Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., etal. (2016) Digital Ethnography: Principles and
Practice (London: Sage).
Pink, S. and Leder Mackley, K. (2013) Saturated and Situated: Rethinking Media
in Everyday Life. Media, Culture and Society 35(6): 67791.
Pink, S. and Abram, S. (Eds.) (2015) Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement,
(Oxford: Berghahn).
Postill, J. (2015) Public Anthropology in Times of Media Hybridity and Global
Upheaval. In S. Pink and S. Abram (Eds.), Media, Anthropology and Public
Engagement (Oxford: Berghahn), pp.16481.
CHAPTER 9
EmilyLaDue
E. LaDue ()
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
REFLEXIVITY
As the history of anthropology coincides with the history of colonial-
ism, and through the work of many of those cited here, ethnography as a
method has been working to reinvent itself as subversive to these tenden-
cies. Michael Taussig provokes the idea that when race, gender, and other
signifiers were social constructions, the brilliance of the pronouncement
was blinding so that the beginnings of knowledge were made to pass
for actual knowing (1993, p. xvi). Reflexivity had this affect on anthro-
pologyit was a first step toward decolonizing the discipline, but it was
taken as an end; and then arguably served to curtail efforts at decolonizing
anthropology from radical Black and Brown movements and scholarship
across the world (Harrison 1997). James Clifford and George Marcus
(1986) are usually credited with bringing in the reflexive turn, although
this can be seen as part of the problem in the crediting of the move-
ment toward reflexivity. Perhaps it was the struggles of decolonization
and within that refusing to be objectified by the West that led anthro-
pologists to have to put their structural positioning into question.2 The
reflexive turn is often discussed as a product of the post-modern turn, but
both are symptomatic reactions of the institutionalized West to the politi-
cal struggles of the mid-20th century (see Reyes 2012). The direction of
knowledge is from struggle to researcher, regardless of whether there is a
reflexive account built in of how that process is taking place (Buck-Morss
2009). This is the point where an intervention must be made on two
levels if we are to be politically engaged: where we position ourselves as
170 E. LADUE
researchers in relation to political struggle, and who and what our research
is serving. I return to this in the final section of the chapter.
The reflexive turn in anthropology came as a corrective to the colonial
apparatus that anthropology was built to support, but is constantly falling
short because the basis of its research is acceptance of the othereven
the self as otherat times perhaps putting into question why and how
we are othered from each other and ourselves, but never actually able
to struggle against that global structure and condition. Since Clifford
and Marcuss Writing Culture in 1986, the debate over thick description
and thin description made a turn to a particular style and poetics that
can be used to communicate effectively what it is that we study ethno-
graphically. This attention to style has been at the center of these anthro-
pological debatesnot the act of research itself, but the ways on which
anthropologists are presenting their work. But as Mascia-Lees etal. warn,
Anthropologists influenced by postmodernism have recognized the need
to claim a politics in order to appeal to an anthropological audience that
is thirsty for inclusion and knowledge about the world-changing move-
ments of the colonized and ghettoized populations of the world (1989,
p. 14). Yet in arguing that the reflexive turn is another demonstration
of the power of the male ethnographer and serves only to reinforce the
power and direction of the male ethnographic gaze, a move made by femi-
nist theory decades earlier, they too fail to consider the struggles for life
and liberation of indigenous and colonized people for the past five hun-
dred years, with the struggle of women fitting into that history as well.
Their argument falls short as equating the relationship of anthropologist
to native to the relationship of man to womanbecause, for one, what of
native women, a discussion more fully wrought by Trinh Minh-Ha that
same year, and what of the world structure built on the relationship of
colonizer to colonized (Trinh 1989; Mies 1986)?
Reflexive, distinct from only reflective, does not merely imply peering
at ourselves, but taking ourselves into account as we work and making
adjustments. Clifford and Marcuss Writing Culture culminates in this idea
and brings to light the importance of Geertzs thick description and the
researchers positioning as a vessel for observation and analysis (Clifford
and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1973). John Jacksons intervention calling for
thin description asks researchers instead to take seriously the notion that
we do not know everything, we cannot observe everything, and that the
move to make claims to know everything is subscribing to a belief in a
purity of culture that just is not sincere (Jackson 2013). Thin description
VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY ANDTHECITY: ONTHEDEAD ENDS OFREFLEXIVITY... 171
FILMING OURSELVES
Not least because digital media and ways to play digital media are in the
hands of more people, and books and journals from academic presses are
not, video offers a possible intervention if produced for these purposes.
Faye Harrison noted both Zora Neale Hurstons and Katherine Dunhams
use of literature and dance to share knowledge more broadly beyond the
academy before it was in vogue to do so (Harrison 1997, p.6). Just as
the current call for body cameras on police officers is limited because it
keeps the power of the camera in the hands of the powerful, and because
discussions of gentrification are being used to fill in for actual structural
antagonism (or being used to prevent it), calling on anthropologists to
record what they are doing through video does not disrupt the flow and
direction of vision. Margaret Mead (2003) called on anthropologists to
use the filmic and photographic technology available to them to record
people and their behavior in order more clearlyin other words, more sci-
entificallyto understand and represent them, because of the additional
172 E. LADUE
as isolated individuals with little power to act and only power to reflect
and critique, a valuable but ancillary function? The film does not have to
offer solutions, but by positing that if better policies to prevent massive
development and the self-reflection of gentrifiers may offer a way out, it
leaves power in the hands of those same people. When an ethnographer or
filmmaker includes their own role in perpetuating a process that they are
critiquing, it reveals to us not their ethnographic sincerity, but their lack
of ability to be both in and outrevealing this position reveals a defini-
tive in, perhaps because of the ability of the academy to accommodate
critique without any change (Jackson 2005; Harrison 2008). The cause
of gentrification is placed on corporations and city officials supporting
corporate development, which then allows a false sense of unity and com-
munity to appear among the characters in the film, including Anderson.
Andersons making of the film is equated with her taking responsibility
for these actions. This film does offer us a chance to do ethnography on a
text categorized as documentary but presenting itself as a reflexive study,
with the filmmaker giving the audience a narrative of herself and her posi-
tionality in relation to her subject, in this case gentrification. Arguably, the
film presents a collective voice of Brooklyn rooted in a structural position
of black and brown communities as represented through interviews and
footage of organized attempts to stop certain developments. However, it
does not articulate this as such, but instead operates from a reflexive posi-
tion, Anderson a gentrifier looking not to be, and realizing that may not
be an option without dramatic change. The vague horizon of change ends
without a politics, and with an individual consumer-based view of gentri-
fication that leaves the viewer being asked to be sympathetic to Anderson
and to blame other structures of capitalist power for this process.
posed as racist, judgmental, and old, gives both the gentrifier and the
researcher the image of political intent and action through whatever indi-
vidual action may be undertaken (Smith 1996, p.41). Observed in cit-
ies across the world, gentrifying neighborhoods are marked by defining
features of individualism, consumerism, and humanitarian discourses and
actions that are manifest in businesses such as CrossFit gyms, yoga studios,
cafs, jazz clubs, and breweries. In sociology, Sharon Zukin (1982, 2014)
and David Grazian (2003) have offered extensive research on the con-
sumption cultures of gentrification and the desire of white middle-class
populations to get close to what they see as authentic culturethrough
consuming blackness in the form of historically black cultural production
(jazz, blues, soul, and hip hop music; soul food) and in cultures centered
around the consumption of a product able to contain various levels of
dedication and erudition (coffee, beer, and various food trends). The
prevalence of individual improvement and focus on the self in the form
of body sculpting, meditation, extreme athletics, and health food dem-
onstrates a crossover between individualism and humanitarianism, such as
with yoga studios offering various retreats involving community service
and donations to various aid groups, charity races, and free community
days at CrossFit gyms.
The focus on the individual and their place in the world and respon-
sibility as a global citizen has given ample reasoning and justification
for socially responsible consumerism, popularly represented by companies
such as Whole Foodswhich took over many spaces that were previously
run by local cooperatives in cities; now, in cities such as Durham, NC,
cooperatives opened as anchors in gentrifying neighborhoods are reopen-
ing and positioning themselves as the local alternative to Whole Foods.
In these spaces a working critique of gentrification is now operating. In
Durham, at the grand opening of the new co-op, representatives from its
non-profit landlord raised the issue of whether what they are doing is gen-
trification, during a conversation about the role of the co-op in attracting
wealthier populations into the black working-class neighborhood within
which it sits. Duke University, a major actor in the redevelopment of
Durham for the past two decades, sponsored and hosted a talk in one
of its redeveloped warehouse spaces about gentrification in the city. The
talk, by a former city planner and homeowner in one of the most rent-
intensifying districts in the city, offered a brief history of unequal devel-
opment in cities, detailed research on the levels of rent intensification
in gentrifying neighborhoods, and a discussion about what to do about
VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY ANDTHECITY: ONTHEDEAD ENDS OFREFLEXIVITY... 175
charter school next door. Ultimately, the city drafted a resolution that left
the park closed for a year, a critical year in which nearly the entire commu-
nity was priced out of the neighborhood as houses and apartments flipped
and the area filled with eight bars and restaurants.
During this struggle, the community center in the neighborhood that
was working to save the field, El Kilombo Intergalactico, began flagging
up the resulting inequalities of Durhams wave of development and relat-
ing it to the recent historical wave of gentrification across the world. They
have written a thorough account of this struggle (see El Kilombo 2011).
Hundreds of low-income residents and their supporters filled city council
and other quasi-public meetings about the park, and a handful of their
opponents would turn out as well. It was during the park struggle that I
began filming gentrification and its resistance in Durham, and studying
with El Kilombo. However, outside of those being displaced in the neigh-
borhood, El Kilombo, and several community supporters, no one wanted
to hear that gentrification was happening in Durham. Even supporters of
the community viewed this as an isolated struggle, and in my interviews
and inlocal media, Durham was being conceived and discussed as success-
fully avoiding gentrification, and as doing development better than other
cities such as Brooklyn, NY, Portland, OR, Austin, TX, and San Francisco,
CA. In fact, several of the supporters were new to Durham from these
other cities, leaving in part to escape gentrification. In Durham, they said,
people were aware that this could happen, but were taking steps to provide
opportunities to poor people, preserve low-income housing, and include
several voices in this development.
Since then, six new hotels have been built, dozens of restaurants and
bars have opened, and major neighborhoods have shifted. According to
census reports, the quickest-changing neighborhoods near downtown
have changed by over 40 % from low to high income. Durham Innovation
District built in old warehouse spaces to attract biotech research and devel-
opment companies. Suddenly, discussions of gentrification are brimming.
Articles have circulated in news and social media (Cook 2014; Lilly 2013;
Hartman 2015). An art exhibit in a downtown gallery entitled Durham
Under Development went on view in February 2016, and includes sev-
eral community events including community forums, artist receptions,
and a spoken word and dance performance. Two hotels are sponsors of
the show, and proudly boast about their own local space and community
development work, while carefully recognizing that there is a long way to
go for equality in the city.
178 E. LADUE
Imagine an engagement with what is usually left over from (and left out of)
academic theories of racial essentialism and social constructedness. It is eth-
nography of the fake, the simulated, the counterfeit, if only insofar as such
a predilection helps us peek through realitys opened back doors. (Jackson
2005, p.59)
NOTES
1. El Kilombo Intergalacticos writings can be found at http://www.elki-
lombo.org/our-word.
2. I owe this thinking to Alvaro Reyess lectures from his Geography course at
the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Racialized Spaces and
Proper Places: Frantz Fanon, Fall 2015.
3. Except that the issue of gentrification was raised almost a decade ago by a
local community facing displacement and El Kilombo Intergalacticos
articulation.
4. The term impossible has been used by El Kilombo and by the EZLN to
refer to the impossibility of the project of politics ahead of us, but that this
impossible choice is the only actual choice (El Kilombo 2012; EZLN 2014).
VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY ANDTHECITY: ONTHEDEAD ENDS OFREFLEXIVITY... 185
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CHAPTER 10
PaolaSartoretto
P. Sartoretto ()
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
are better suited to tackling the one-medium bias (Mattoni and Trer
2014) and the reductionist categorization between the haves and have-
nots (Pieterse 2009) that Qiu (2009) identified.
In a recent article on de-Westernizing communication studies, Waisbord
and Mellado (2014) highlight a number of aspects that have made media
and communication studies a field that has been constructed on Western
ideas and problems. This has led to theory building that explains phe-
nomena that are typical of WesternNorthern societies. If research has
as a starting point concepts and theories that are not easily transferable
to non-Western realities, it will probably not use methodologies that
allow for new theory building. In this sense, ethnographic methodologies
that depart from open ontological premises can be a way to address the
Western bias in media and communication studies.
In this sense, this methodological effort resonates with Boaventura
de Sousa Santoss (2007) argument that Western social sciences create
absences by not properly accounting for and recognizing the experiences
that fall outside the WesternNorthern context. It follows that those who
lack material resources in the form of technologies and the skills to use
these technologies are put in the condition of helpless victims for whom
the only goal is modernization. The linear views on modernization and
reductionist ideas on technological skills are examples of ontological
premises that guide methodological choices, which in turn make certain
experiences invisible. Methodological choices are thus one way to address
the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots, addressing in this
way the invisibility of certain groups and practices. As an outcome, we can
reach a more nuanced understanding of the intersection between social
action and media. Because it is an open-ended method that looks deep
into lived experiences, ethnography allows for a more multi-faceted con-
sideration of media practices. Instead of departing from media usage and
concentrating on the medium, an ethnographic study will depart from
the group in question and make visible not only the media practices, but
also how certain struggles develop and how communicative processes are
a constitutive element in social struggles. Furthermore, the abundance of
technological artifacts and easy access to the latest technologies that we
enjoy in the West can blind us to the fact that the majority of people live
with scarce access to technologies. It is equally important to understand
how these people deal with scarcity than it is to delve into our technology-
saturated lives. The key here is the fact that there are no pre-determined
assumptions about roles and uses of technologies that guide ethnographic
EXPLORING INCLUSIVE ETHNOGRAPHY ASAMETHODOLOGY TOACCOUNT... 195
work, different from other methodologies. This means that practices and
realities that might not be accounted for or addressed by theory will be
made visible through empirical efforts (Waisbord and Mellado 2014).
Of course, it is not possible to solve these problems just by choosing cer-
tain methodologies. It is also necessary to be aware of exclusion and invis-
ibility dynamics that may play a role in designing research strategies and
choosing empirical cases. Recent studies that analyze the interplay between
media and social action and protest can illustrate this argument. Many of
these studies have particularly looked into so-called new media practices,
focusing on a specific medium or platform (Kavada 2010; Kropczynski
and Nah 2011; Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Harlow 2012; Lester and
Hutchins 2012; Meraz and Paparachissi 2013; Penney and Dadas 2013).
When the medium strictly guides methodological and empirical choices,
we run two different risks. The first is the exclusion of groups who are
not activeor not active enoughusers of technologies. The second
is the exclusion of practices that are in essence communicative but that
are not mediated by new technologies. As discussed in the previous sec-
tion, the creation of absences can be particularly noticed in the discussion
about the interplay between media and political participation and action.
These exclusions have so far led to a technological-deterministic bias in
the understanding of the interplay between media and political and social
action. The idea that wherever and whenever there is media there will be
communicationand that the more media there are, the more commu-
nication there will beis insidiously gaining a stake in the discipline as
a quasi-paradigm. One way to problematize and challenge this idea is by
using methodological strategies that allow for the inclusion of groups and
practices that are less visible and act outside the global hubs of action.
Such groups and practices have to be approached not as residuals
of modernization processeswhich is usually the case when we depart
from technological-determinist premisesbut as constitutive parts of
a reality that needs to be analyzed in its own terms. The first step to
designing inclusive methodologies is to avoid two different biases: the
technological bias and the one-medium bias (Mattoni and Trer 2014).
Taking this first step requires an ethnographic mindset (Geertz 1973)
in order to see beyond the appearances. Different from other methods
that isolate the empirical object that is being studied from its context,
ethnography is a context-based method. This means that the researcher
accesses technologies, cultural products, and the practices related to
them in a holistic and relational way.
196 P. SARTORETTO
Epistemological i l Empiri
Empirical
Standpoints: standpoints:
Open-ended Approach to media
as ecology, instead
What people do of individual
with media technologies.
Routines and
activities - practices
Approach to social
Socialization, relations in which
rationales and media are included.
learning processes.
observation and kept a fieldwork diary during the trips. MST has press
offices in Braslia and So Paulo staffed by what I refer to as professional
militant journalists: professional journalists, many of them employed by
MST, who are also active in the movement as militants, which means that
their professional position as journalists is extrapolated from their activi-
ties in the movement. In addition, MTS runs a few radio stations in the
rural communities where its members livethese were the sites where
fieldwork was carried out.
By approaching the fieldwork with an open outlook toward practices, I
was able to include in the analyses communicative and interactional pro-
cesses that do not necessarily involve media, but play a role in how media
are incorporated in routines and rituals. An example is what movement
members refer to as organicity (see Sartoretto 2015), which means the
processes through which decisions are made and daily activities are car-
ried out in the movement. MST members see this as a democratic process
because it is organic to the movementthey have created mechanisms and
spaces that favor discussion and exchange of ideas. In this context, tech-
nologies have a contentious role, because the immediacy that characterizes
many new media such as email and mobile phones is seen as a threat to
the organic interaction dynamics that the organization has achieved. The
differences here are encountered more in the orientations toward tech-
nologiesthat is, the ways in which people relate to technologiesthan
in the technologies themselves. Although technologies have their affor-
dances (Williams 2003), people and groups will appropriate (Sartoretto
2015) technologies in different ways, following diverse dynamics, which
can only be grasped through non-media-centric approaches. Such contex-
tual analysis would not be possible with methods that systematically isolate
media as variables in an equation.
Departing from an empirically based questionwhat do people do
with media?and observing the situations and processes in which media
are present, I was able to address analytically rationales and processes of
socialization in which media play a central role. These processes proved to
be a crucial element in the generational transition from older movement
members who founded the organization to younger ones. Through obser-
vation of meetings, daily routines, and events, it was possible to grasp
the conflicts that are brought by new media, learning processes, and the
socialization of practices associated with new media, as well as how prac-
tices related to different media overlapfor instance, theatre and video
production, visual arts, and digital social media.
200 P. SARTORETTO
mobilize collectively and perform political and social action, they use a
variety of media in varied ways that are many times interconnected. That
is why a multi-media approach is ideal to grasp this complexity and variety.
This interrelation and overlapping between different media practices have
been acknowledged in recent studies (Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Harlow
2012) but not extensively explored, because these studies only investigate
practices related to one medium. While surveys can identify the relation
between media practices (Enjolras et al. 2013), it would be difficult to
perform an analytic description of this relation through a non-contextual
methodology such as survey or experiment.
At the empirical level, an approach to media as an ecology of differ-
ent technologies and platforms (Tacchi 2006) facilitates the inclusion of a
variety of groups in society. Considering the inequality in access and skills
that is found in peripheral countries such as Brazil, research that isolates
digital media from older technologies excludes a large part of the popula-
tion who have limited access to technologies. This exclusion contributes
to the narrative that technologies and skills are necessary to social and
political mobilization, which is far from reality. In this sense, approach-
ing media as an ecology can help us understand the mechanisms through
which those who do not have access to technologies and the disposable
time and skills to use them find ways to mobilize.
Using this approach in my fieldwork meant that I was able to assess
the contentions in using technologies and the rationales for deliberately
slowing down the process of adoption when there is a wide gap in access
and when there are already other channels of communication in place. In
the case of MST, the communication sector in the organization deliber-
ately chooses not to use digital social networks for organizing protests and
demonstrations, only using its Facebook profile to broadcast these events
when they have already happened. The demonstrations at squares, differ-
ent government buildings, and agribusiness companies research facilities,
blocking of motorways, and so on are organized solely through internal
channels of communication constructed through time. MST is a social
movement whose mobilization depends on face-to-face communication,
because this is a mode of communication whose public and access to con-
tent can be controlled more easily than digital platforms. Moreover, it
has developed media practices that differ from those of Western urban
middle-class formations in order to adapt to its particular profile as an
organization that is vilified by some sectors of society, and to the profile
of a membership that does not have the resources to make profuse use
202 P. SARTORETTO
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have argued for non-media-centric multi-media ethnog-
raphy as a way to include experiences outside the Western context in the
process of theory and knowledge building. Non-media-centric ethnogra-
phy is particularly needed to explain the interplay between communica-
tion and mobilization in unequal societies where access to information
technologies is not widespread. Because it has social relationsin which
media are included as a starting point, the method allows us to grasp a
wide range of communicative processes in which technologies are not the
central element, or are used in ways that contradict dominant narratives of
technology abundance.
This kind of ethnographic study can contribute to developing more
diverse conceptualizations of communication in social movements that
account for realities outside Western industrialized nations and regions.
The emergence of new media technologies and their rapid spread in devel-
oped countries over the last decade has created a dominant narrative about
the abundance and omnipresence of media. In this sense, non-media-cen-
tric ethnographic studies can help develop more diverse explanations of
the relation between media and social mobilization that account for expe-
riences outside the hegemonic West.
EXPLORING INCLUSIVE ETHNOGRAPHY ASAMETHODOLOGY TOACCOUNT... 203
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CHAPTER 11
NehaKumar
As more and more of our lives penetrates the digital sphere and big
datadriven approaches to understanding the world grow increasingly
pervasive, it becomes relevant to reflect on whether there is still a need
for alternative, more traditional forms of data gathering in media and
communications research. Mark Andrejevic (2013) discusses the relatively
recent epistemological turn that draws greater attention to big data,
circumventing and displacing representation. We must note, however, that
although there is an abundance of digital data now increasingly available
to fuel this research, it remains highly provincializedequipped to tell us
much more about the West than about the rest of the world, particularly
the global South, which still lacks representation in our increasingly digital
media landscape (Kluver etal. 2013). In this chapter I discuss some of the
challenges that arise when we set out to collect data from communities
that are under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented. The
challenges that researchers in these contexts encounter are not merely
logistical or physical, such that the mere processes of getting to and from
remote locations and overcoming linguistic barriers are difficult. The
greater challenge becomes discerning the questions to ask that are relevant
N. Kumar ()
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
PRIOR WORK
Before I proceed, I must clarify that I am, of course, by no means the
first to conduct interviews or qualitative research. Excellent precedents
exist in the works of Kvale (1996), Bryman and Burgess (1999), Chase
(2011), and Bryman (2016), among others. Nor am I the first to high-
light that interviews (and other qualitative inquiry) can reveal truths that
quantitative approaches might obscure (Becker 1996; Rubin and Rubin
2011). My goal is to draw on my own interviewing experiences in particu-
lar contexts in order to emphasize how these interviews retain a position
of methodological relevance in an increasingly data-driven world. These
contexts allude to the constraints in which the field of information and
communication technology and development (ICTD) is enveloped.
ICTD is a fairly new and rapidly growing research domain that exam-
ines the applicability of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) to development goalsthose that were put forward by the United
Nations in 2000 as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and then
in 2015 as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; see Sachs 2012).
Researching the design, deployment, adoption, and use of ICTs in the con-
text of under-represented, under-served, and/or under-resourced com-
munitiesparticularly in developing parts of the worldis ridden with
methodological challenges. A preliminary discussion of these appeared in
Brewer etal.s (2005) and Anokwa etal.s (2009) works in the early days of
ICTD.Burrell and Toyama (2009) took this discussion further by address-
ing the challenges that arise when there are disparities in epistemological
approaches. The field has since expanded considerably, embracing varied
epistemologies and allowing for an increasingly cohesive co-existence of
researchers from different disciplines keen to grow ICTD further as a field
of research, a body of literature, and an established and recognized research
community (Dell and Kumar 2016). This is the community I address in
210 N. KUMAR
particular with this chapter, with the objective of enriching our abilityas
a fieldfirst to recognize and then to grapple with the methodological
challenges that ICTD engenders as we proceed to develop a more nuanced
understanding of the socio-cultural dimensions that affect our research.
There is also a second audience that I targetthose who conduct
media and communications research and pursue (or stumble into, as I
did) contexts such as mine that are under-studied, but also abundant
with less-understood social and cultural nuances that might interfere
with appropriate interpretation of the data that are collected (Keats 2009;
Bamberger 2000). And finally, I add to the active, ongoing conversation
that challenges the role that big data can play overall in media and
communications research (boyd and Crawford 2012).
This included looking into the nature of the mobile media they consumed
and shared and the socio-technical configurations that emerged to support
this new demand for mobile media.
My second study took place in the context of a maternal health inter-
vention called Projecting Health (for more details on the project, see
Kumar etal. 2015) across three blocks of the Raebareli district in the state
of Uttar Pradesh. The team of researchers involved included health and
technology experts. In this project, globally approved health norms were
translated into locally crafted videos with the guidance of global health
professionals and by community actors, including non-governmental
organizations with several years of experience in the field and frontline
health workers, among others. Although the project was operated largely
by male members of these communities, this intervention brought me
face to face with a diverse group of women coming from different caste/
class backgroundsboth young and old, those who were relatively edu-
cated and employed by the government to perform the tasks of a frontline
health worker, as well as women who were less educated (often illiter-
ate) and unemployed. The health workers were responsible for organizing
monthly meetings of the new and pregnant mothers in their neighbor-
hoods and screening here the videos that had been created locally. This
screening would allow the attendees some time with the health worker
to pose their questions. It also gave them a space in which to interact
with each other and share an experience that they could later discuss.
Since the intervention aimed to inform the mother as well as other older
women in the household, mothers-in-law and aunts of the new mothers
were also welcome to attend these meetings. When I did have a chance
to meet the women face to face, I was also able to ask them about their
technology practices and observe them interact with their mobile phones.
In the remaining part of this chapter, I will compare these experiences and
discuss the differences between them.
GAINING ACCESS
As mentioned earlier, my research found male youths to be the lead adopt-
ers of mobile phones across the Indian field sites I studied, engaging with
their devices for various forms of media consumption and sharing. Their
practices also gain more visibility because they are themselves more visible,
as discussed in prior work (Kumar 2015). Accordingly, in the range of the
urban and rural locales I explored, access to male youths was significantly
212 N. KUMAR
easier to obtain than access to women. Not only are men more readily
found in public places, they are willing and uninhibited when it comes
to conversations with an outsider, and interested in learning about their
lives. Being a woman was frequently influential in this regard as well. By
contrast, both young and old women were harder to reach. As a research
contact mentioned, If you want to talk to women, you will have to spend
more time. You will have to go into their homes. You will have to get to
know them. In the course of my doctoral research, given the novelty of
the findings obtained from talking to the men alone, I chose to focus on
the latter at that time, instead of investing the time to study women, which
would have involved visiting one home after another for hours on end. An
additional complication was that obtaining female research contacts was a
challenge in several of my field sites, since this task required the women to
have a fundamentally outgoing naturenot as socially acceptable a way of
being for rural Indian women overall.
I first chose to do what came more easilyreaching out to the most acces-
sible participants and slowly snowball sampling (Goodman 1961) deeper and
wider into the community. However, this led to talking only to more male
youths. Were I merely to present these findings, my research would serve
to generate the general impression that it was only men who engaged with
mobile phones. With several of these men also being of the view that women
did not know how to use mobile devices, in addition to the fact that several
of the women do not own mobile devices, sampling techniques that relied
on these inputs would lead to skewed findings. For an accurate picture to
emerge that does justice to the complexities around womens ownership and
use of mobile phones, data about their engagement with mobile phones must
be collected using more qualitative approaches. Data-driven approaches that
have a quantitative basis lack the sensitivity required to uncover the existing
power structures that dictate technological interactions.
For an accurate picture to emerge, the researcher must jump over
methodological hurdles, charting the paths for data to emerge. In the case
of my research, a degree of reflexivity was essential in order to explain the
focus on male participants. This also helped to highlight the fact that what
one does not see can be as crucial as what one does observe. For example,
by focusing on male youths, I was unable to discern the contribution that
their relative social freedom made to their technology-adoption curves.
The fact that there were physical spaces to which these youths had access
and the women did not was something I overlooked in the initial phases
of my fieldwork. I discuss this further later.
INTERVIEWING AGAINST THEODDS 213
WHY INTERVIEW?
Before continuing to discuss interviewing, I return to the question of
whether interviews can offer us insights that an abundance of data cannot.
My field experiences offered me a suitable counterexample in this record.
With the start of our health intervention Projecting Health, we made sure
diligently to capture data regarding meetings among stakeholders and the
disseminations that took place in the meetings of Accredited Social Health
Activists (ASHAs) with the mothers. We knew who attended which dis-
semination, where it was organized, and whether there were any problems
that arose because of which the dissemination was disturbed. We had access
to all the kinds of numbers that we could possibly collect. In one of my
initial field visits to rural Uttar Pradesh, I was keen to meet with women
who had attended these disseminations and interacted with our interven-
tion to ask them about their experience. To create a list of women to meet,
I went through success stories, transcripts of short conversations that our
ground staff had organized in order to hear from community members.
One such woman was Rani, from the village of Bhitargaon, who had
indicated in her story that everyone at home, including her husband and
father-in-law, had viewed the film on Danger Signs and knew what to
look out for when she went into labor if there were complications. This
seemed unusual to me, since it was generally unheard of for men to attend
these disseminationsthey are organized for women and it goes against
social norms for men to participate in a roomful of women. I asked if I
could interview Rani and the project staff first introduced me to the ASHA
who was responsible for the area in which Rani lived. This ASHA took
me to Ranis house, where I found that it was not okay for me to enter
her house and she was not permitted to leave it because her father-in-law
would disapprove. The interview took place with the two of us seated on
either side of the threshold of the house. During this interview, I found
that Rani had been pregnant but unable to leave the confines of her house
because she had married into an upper-caste family where, I was told, it
was customary for daughters-in-law to stay at home until they had had a
couple of children. As a result, the ASHA had taken it upon herself to bor-
row the pico projector and conduct a dissemination inside Ranis house.
That is why the men in the household had been able to watch the film as
well. This was a critical findingthat some daughters-in-law could not
be reached through meetings organized by ASHAs and the ASHAs had
resorted to conducting unofficial disseminations that they considered
214 N. KUMAR
volunteer their own. These group interviews would frequently evolve into
brainstorming sessions since the women would discuss topics such as how
the films could be disseminated more widely within their communities,
among others. If some women were relatively quiet, the others would
goad them into voicing their views, saying speak, dont be shy, thus help-
ing my cause. Had I been a male researcher this kind of access would have
been out of the question, which brings me to the question of how the
quality of research might be affected by the gender of the researcher in
such settings, influencing the larger body of work overall.
get him to engage with me. When my research contact spoke to him,
however, he responded. I learned that he did not wish to engage because
I was a woman. His online activity would have revealed a different persona
altogether, where socio-cultural boundaries seemed only to dissolve.
Conversations around caste also made their way into my interviews. Raja,
a mobile shop assistant in Bikaner, asked me what caste I belonged to. In an
effort to stress my progressive stand, I said that it did not matter. He persisted,
saying that I made no sensethat the government recorded castes in census
data, so who was I to say they did not matter? His conclusion was that I came
from a lower, backward caste because I was unwilling to reveal it. Gradually
Ilearned that my participants in Bikaner would openly converse with me only
once they had satisfied themselves that I belonged to a respectable caste.
This became apparent when one mobile shop owner asked my research con-
tact his full (including family) name. My contact left out his family name and
only mentioned his middle namefrom which his caste could not be deter-
mined. The shop owner then asked for the neighborhood where my contact
lived. I was told later that he had done so to ascertain whether the neigh-
borhood housed respectable families from upper castes. As the conversation
progressed, I learned that speaking style was also a clear indicator of caste. The
differential treatment meted out to members of different castes was unknown
to me at first because I had nothing to which to compare.
Although caste helped me get easier access, class was not always on my
side. I was seen as privileged by most groups and individuals I interviewed.
Not only were my physical traitsmy height or my short hairanomalous,
being city bred meant (to them) that I was weaker and less experienced.
When I was offered water by a group of women in rural Rajasthan, I said
yesonly to be laughed at minutes later because I could not drink directly
from a pitcher without spilling the water. The men were unwilling to believe
that I was doing researchthey thought I was likely to be the police or
a reporter because I carried a camera and asked too many (seemingly
irrelevant) questions. One mobile shop owner thought I was asking questions
because I wanted to start an illegal downloads business of my own, and
proceeded to explain where Ishould invest and what would be less lucrative.
This was when I was carefully transparent about my identity.
Gender, caste, and class are the boundaries that I encountered repeat-
edly in my work. There are others, such as religion, race, or region, which
could have just as easily played a role. These have impacts on both the
nature and quality of data collected as well as how the researcher is seen
by the participants. These boundaries can sometimes be circumvented
INTERVIEWING AGAINST THEODDS 217
MOBILE DATA
In this chapter, I have discussed research that was aimed at understand-
ing the mobile media practices of men and women. Could studying mobile
devices help in achieving this research outcome, circumventing the need
for interviews? One of my early research attempts was indeed to obtain
mobile phone data from devices by looking at memory cards and the con-
tent on them. Since the devices used were feature phones (those equipped
with memory cards but not internet enabled) and data plans were still unaf-
fordable, the content on these devices was controlled largely by the mobile
shop owners and not the individuals, based on the frequency of visits to
their shops. Thus, most devices had similar-looking repositories of mobile
media. Interviews were necessary to understand where this content came
from, who it was shared with, and how. Yet those interviews could not tell
me, without self-reporting bias, what media my participants were consum-
ing on their devices. A major confounding factor was the shared technology
access model that was prevalent among my participants. Frequently, multiple
individuals accessed one mobile device, as against a one-to-one device-own-
ership model. This is starkly different from the modes of use prevalent in the
global North. Although I had expected that privacy would be a concern
because what individuals have on their mobile phones could be of an entirely
personal natureit turned out to be less so than I had anticipated. Mobile
shop owners talked openly about the content on their customers phones,
although offensive content was labeled family content and not discussed
(likely because of my gender). Women, on the other hand, were comfortable
218 N. KUMAR
sharing everything on their devices with me. Once again, without the use of
qualitative and/or ethnographic methods, we may be likely to make inac-
curate assumptions regarding privacy concerns.
CONCLUSION
The objective of this chapter was to do two things. The first was to argue
that even though we are living in an increasingly data-driven world, there are
research contexts (such as the study of the mobile media practices of mar-
ginalized communities) where big data may not be relevant. The second
was to demonstrate how careful interviewing, ethnographically motivated,
can lead to reliable data, particularly when there is awareness regarding how
socio-cultural differences between the researcher and the researched can
unfold and influence the processes of data collection and analysis. In addi-
tion to gender, class, and caste, as discussed here, various other socially
constructed realities can similarly influence data-collection processes, as well
as the authenticity of the data collected. Experimenting with these different
lenses can aid the researcher in becoming cognizant of the socio-cultural
forces at play. Paying attention to these differences is only a recent trend in
ICTD research (Dell and Kumar 2016), as the field matures and is better
able to understand ICT use and adoption. I reiterate that not only would
quantitative, data-driven approaches be unable to capture the essence of
these differences, they would prevent us from even uncovering what differ-
ences might exist. In my field experiences, I found that widening the net
to include different dimensions in my purposive sampling process gave me
a richer understanding of the socio-technical context I was in, leading to
greater confidence in my findings (Burrell and Toyama 2009): for example,
working through the difference between perception and reality as far as
womens mobile practices were concerned. Not only must these differences
be duly acknowledged, the researcher needs also to be attentive to their
potential impact on the quality of the resulting research.
REFERENCES
Andrejevic, M. (2013) Infoglut: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way
We Think and Know (New York: Routledge).
Anokwa, Y., Smyth, T., Ramachandran, D., etal. (2009) Stories From the Field:
Reflections on HCI4D Experiences. Information Technologies & International
Development 5(4): 10115.
INTERVIEWING AGAINST THEODDS 219
Visualization
LevManovich
VISUALIZING MEDIA
Early 21st-century media researchers have access to unprecedented
amounts of mediamore than they can possibly study, let alone search or
even simply watch. A number of interconnected developments that took
place between 1990 and 2010digitization of analog media collections,
decrease in prices and expansion in capacities of portable computer-based
media devices, the rise of user-generated content and social media, and
globalization that increased the number of agents and institutions produc-
ing media around the worldled to an exponential increase in the quantity
of media while simultaneously making it much easier to find, share, teach
with, and research. Many millions of hours of television programs already
digitized by various national libraries and media museums, digitized library
photo collections, billions of videos on YouTube and photos on Instagram,
and numerous other media sources are waiting to be explored by research-
ers. The chapters following this short introduction address potential ways
of managing and making inspiring use of the vast amount of visual data.
How do we take advantage of this new scale of media in practice? For
instance, let us say that we are interested in studying howpresentationsand
interviews by political leaders are reused and contextualized by television
L. Manovich ()
CUNY, New York City, NY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
222 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
However, even the richest metadata available today for media collec-
tions do not capture many patterns that we can easily notice when we
directly watch video, look at photographs, or view websitesfor example,
when we study the media itself as opposed to metadata about it. So when
we use bar plots, scatter plots, networks, maps, and other standard visual-
ization techniques to show patterns in (for example) distributions of tele-
vision subjects, or the sentiment of user posts about the shows, this is not
sufficient. So what is the solution? I think that rather than only thinking of
media and communication scholars as users of existing visualization tech-
niques and tools, we need to encourage them to develop new techniques
that can allow them to study media artifacts themselves at any scale.
The popular media-access technologies of the 19th and 20th cen-
turies, such as slide lanterns, film projectors, microforms, Moviola and
Steenbeck, record players, audio- and video-tape recorders, and video-
cassette recorders, were designed to access a single media item at a time at
a limited range of speeds. This went hand in hand with the organization
of media distribution: television channels, movie theaters, radio, record,
and video stores, and libraries would all only make available a few items
at a time. For instance, you could not watch more than a few television
channels at the same time, or borrow more than a few videotapes from a
library.
At the same time, hierarchical classification systems such as library cata-
logs made it difficult to browse a larger collection or explore it in ways
outside of existing classifications. When you walked from shelf to shelf in a
library, you were typically following a classification based on subjects, with
books organized by author names inside each category. Together, these
distribution and classification systems encouraged 20th century media
researchers to decide beforehand what media items to see, hear, or read. A
researcher usually started with some subject in mindfilms by a particular
author, works by a particular photographer, or categories such as 1950s
experimental American films and early 20th century Paris postcards. It
was impossible to imagine navigating through all films ever made or all
postcards ever printed. One of the first media projects to organize its nar-
rative around navigation of a large media archive is Jean-Luc Godards
Histoire(s) du cinema, which draws samples from hundreds of films. The
popular method for describing a larger media setcontent analysis, such
as tagging of semantics in a media collection by several people using a
pre-defined vocabulary of termsalso requires that a researcher decide
beforehand what information would be relevant to tag. In other words,
224 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
NOTES
1. See http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa (accessed 10 March
2016).
2. For this and the following website, see http://publicdomain.nypl.org/pd-
visualization and https://archive.org/details/tv (both accessed 10 March
2016).
CHAPTER 12
Every image embodies a way of seeing wrote the British art critic John
Berger in his 1972 classic Ways of Seeing (Berger 1972, p.10). Through
the book and accompanying television series, he proposed elements of a
critical literacy for making sense of the visual landscapes that we inhabit
from reproductions of art historical masterpieces to the advertising that
adorns our cities and media environments. As well as guiding the attention
of his viewers and readers around specific images, he also sought to examine
the way in which images are reproduced and mediated (drawing on the
J. Gray () S. Milan
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
L. Bounegru
University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Ciuccarelli
Politecnico di Milan, Milan, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
of very informative works on this latter topic (for example Drucker 2014;
Halpern 2015), which we will explore further later. Here our focus is less
on data visualization as a field, but rather on developing the elements
of a critical reflexivity that would accompany and inform the practice of
data visualization in research and other contexts. This critical reflexivity is
important not only in the study of data visualizations as objects, but also
in improving our abilities to deploy them as research devices. We outline
research outlooks and methods for studying all three forms of mediation,
as well as pointing to further resources that may be useful for each one.
Fig. 12.1 Chart of the national debt of England from William Playfairs The
Commercial and Political Atlas (Playfair 1801)
WAYS OFSEEING DATA: TOWARD ACRITICAL LITERACY FORDATA... 233
The first step will often be establishing the data sources. In some cases
details about the sources of the information will be explicitly referenced
or linked to. In other cases additional work might be needed in order to
identify these sources. This might be matching the precise tables or data
sets that are used from a number of possible contenders (for example in
cases where the institution or database is given, but not the exact table or
data set); looking in the software source code or documentation of the
234 J. GRAY ET AL.
obtained the data, which cash flow models they used and why, and the
rationales behind other assumptions they made in the application.5
Publishing data sources has become de rigueur among some data jour-
nalism outlets. A piece from the South China Morning Post explains how
data were extracted from PDF files and provides links to the raw data
used in the visualizations.6 One data visualization from the Guardian
Datablog gives an accompanying spreadsheet that lists a separate source
URL (uniform resource locator) for every figure used.7 If visualization
projects publish the source code of their software, this can be studied in
order to see the data files that have been used. For example, the Budget
Key project by Israeli non-profit Public Knowledge Workshop links to the
source code on the social software-sharing platform GitHub, which makes
visible the changes and transformations that have been made on the data.8
As well as looking at the sourcing and transformation of the data, we
might also look at the selection of particular data sets and tables to high-
light or narrate certain aspects of public finances, such as spending, rev-
enue, or debt. Rather than simply telling the truth about public finances,
these selections emphasize and de-emphasize different aspects of fiscal
policy. We shall further examine the affordances of different visual forms
in the next section. Suffice to say here that the selection of different data
sets and tables is an important step that should be taken into account in
the study of data visualizations, prior to their translation into graphical
form. We can compare the data mediated in the visualization to the other
data that are made available. Which indicators, subtables, or items of data
have been selected, which have been left out, and how does this guide our
attention toward some things and not others?
An interactive news application from The Times (UK) called The Wall
of Debt shows a dominant wall of red bricks depicting national debt,
and a comparatively small green wall called cuts.9 The visual editorial
decision to select these two items is an important one in reading this
interactive graphic, engaging with a particular political economic nar-
rative about tackling public debt through spending cuts. Another short
video clip called Debtris by David McCandless presents a wide variety of
other fiscal data points, ultimately highlighting how the global cost of the
credit crisis dwarfs other sums such as the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries climate change fund, the budget of the United
Nations (UN), African debt to the West, and the funds needed to save
the Amazon rainforest.10 As well as looking at the selection of data on a
case-by-case basis for individual visualizations, comparative analysis may
be undertaken across a larger collection.
236 J. GRAY ET AL.
but their relations with other elements in the visualization as a whole. For
example, compare the use of bubbles in the visualizations in Figs. 12.2,
12.3, 12.4, 12.5, and 12.6).
With these examples we can see how the bubbles are arranged, scaled,
and colored in order to draw out different characteristics of public
financesfrom representing hierarchical relationships in national budgets,
to the locations of development funds, to health spending per capita over
time, to spending per department over time, to relationships between
recipients of public contracts, to the differences between commitments
and spending. In each case, the bubbles are used in different ways to rep-
resent different thingswith the position, size, and color having varying
significance for each graphic. These different ways of organizing visual
phenomena thus articulate and emphasize different ways of organizing
knowledge about public finances.
As well as studying the characteristics of visualizations, their creators
could be interviewed regarding their techniques, methods, software
tools, and design choices. Where software repositories are available,
Fig. 12.5 Network of Dutch public spending on IT services and software (Adriana
Homolova); http://www.homolova.sk/dh/it/# (accessed 10 March 2016)
these can also be analyzed in order to understand how data sources are
being mediated into graphics, whether for individual repositories or for
collections. We might, for example, study repositories associated with
fiscal data visualization projects on GitHub.13
Rather than seeing the visual forms as neutral instruments for making evi-
dence visibleor, as Tufte puts it, instruments for reasoning about quan-
titative information (Tufte 2001, p.9)we can study their genealogies,
aesthetics, and epistemological affordances to situate them in relation to
other ideals, values, and practices. For example, visualizations can be read
against the background of histories of science, technology, and moder-
nity that explore the relationship between vision, knowledge, and image-
making practices, from accounts of occidental ocularcentricism (see Jay
1988) to the role of visual cultures in the development of conceptions of
objectivity (see Daston and Galison 2010).
There have been several recent works that make the case for drawing
on hermeneutic approaches from the humanities to enhance the study of
data visualizations. For example, in her book Graphesis, Johanna Drucker
advocates critical study of visuality from a humanistic perspective
in order to de-naturalize the increasingly familiar interface that has
become so habitual in daily use (Drucker 2014, p.910). She explores
the emergence of contemporary visual epistemology with reference
to a broad range of developments in art, architecture, design, industry,
philosophy, and computer sciencefrom the emergence of graphical design
WAYS OFSEEING DATA: TOWARD ACRITICAL LITERACY FORDATA... 243
Genealogical study may help to enrich research about what has given
rise to the contingent forms that data visualizations may take, identify-
ing a range of different influences and origins of different visual forms.
Starting points may be provided through interviews with designers as well
as content analysis of relevant design materialswhich may be comple-
mented with historical texts and archival research.
We might also study the specific visual forms that are transposed to
mediate public money. Many visualizations are described and/or orga-
nized as dashboards, giving users an overview of multiple key indicators
and trends over time in a single viewing pane, inviting narratives of over-
sight, optimization, balance, and control (see Tkacz 2015).
As well as studying data visualizations as cultural forms from a humanistic
perspective, we can also trace their circulation, reception, and how they are
used and viewed by different publics (see Kennedy etal. 2016). In addition
to interviews and workshops, digital methods could be utilized to extract and
analyze traces from digital platforms and online spaces in order to review the
contexts in which visualizations are being used and shared (Rogers 2013).
For example, we could query for names or URLs of projects on social media,
search engine results, news media, or collections of documents. This may also
help to chart the particular publics and context of usage of the visualizations
which can assist with their study as social and cultural forms.
WAYS OFSEEING DATA: TOWARD ACRITICAL LITERACY FORDATA... 245
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have proposed a heuristic framework that may be used to
develop critical reflexivity around the use of data visualization as an object
of research or a communicative or analytic device in research. We have
illustrated this framework with reference to a collection of data visualiza-
tions about public money, and suggested some methods and approaches
that could be used to study them.
First, we looked at the study of data sources, focusing on research approaches
to examine how they selectively articulate and mediate different aspects of
246 J. GRAY ET AL.
the worldincluding how to identify sources, tracing how they have been
transformed, and studying data infrastructures. Secondly, we looked at ways
to study how the data sources are mediated into graphical formincluding
through the analysis of their visual properties, software, and design choices.
Thirdly and finally, we looked at ways of studying graphical forms as socially,
culturally, and historically contingent forms engendering different ways of
seeingincluding by tracing their diverse influences, and by analyzing their
circulation and contexts of usage.
We hope that the study of these three forms of mediation through some
of the approaches that we have discussed in this chapter may provide a useful
starting point for researchers who wish to use data visualization as a research
object or device. As data visualizations become more and more central,
prominent, and familiar as ways of knowing and organizing phenomena, we
think it becomes imperative to develop a richer understanding of the ways
of seeing and ways of knowing that they engender. Just as Bergers Ways of
Seeing helped to advance broader awareness of the critical study of images
and visual culture, so we hope that further research in this area will advance
literacy around ways of seeing data and ways of seeing with and through
data visualizations. As visualization tools and practices become more and
more ubiquitous, this might include not only the development of a critical
hermeneutics, but also new kinds of self-reflexive praxis for the creation and
reconfiguration of visualizations that are attentive to the forms of mediation
that we have outlined. Experimentation in this direction might be informed
by calls for non-reductive visualization (Manovich 2002), humanistic
interfaces (Drucker 2014), feminist data visualization (DIgnazio 2015),
inventive methods (Lury and Wakeford 2012), rethinking dashboards
(Tkacz 2015), and critical analytics (Rogers 2015).
NOTES
1. See, for example: Cairo, 2012; Card etal., 1999; Cleveland, 1993, 1994;
Few, 2009, 2012, 2013; Heller and Landers, 2014; Katz, 2012; Krum,
2013; Lima, 2011; McCandless, 2012, 2014; Meirelles, 2013; Munzner,
2014; Murray, 2013; Rendgen, 2014; Spence, 2014; Steele and Iliinsky,
2010; Tactical Technology Collective, 2014; Tufte, 1990, 1997a, 1997b,
2001; Yau, 2011, 2013.
2. For an extensive collection of examples of fiscal data visualizations see Gray
(2015b).
WAYS OFSEEING DATA: TOWARD ACRITICAL LITERACY FORDATA... 247
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LucaSimeone andPaoloPatelli
L. Simeone ()
Malm University, Sweden, Malm
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Patelli
Designer and Researcher, Milan, Italy and
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
phenomena is the multiplication of traces left in the digital layer of the city
by its inhabitants and by the devices with which they interact.
Nowadays, a massive amount of user-generated content is created daily
through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and similar online social network-
ing services (see Schroeder 2014). Thanks to the proliferation of digital
devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and ubiquitous connectivity, city
inhabitants and visitors are able to, for example, use online social networks
while on the move, share images and videos in real time, live tweet from
a concert, or check in at their favorite locations.1 Most of these social
networks associate geographic markers with posts, tweets, and pictures,
and this allows for the creation of a significant amount of geo-located
information, which is continuously updated, liked, and commented on by
social media users. This informational layer affects the way in which cities
are perceived or lived in by their inhabitants as well as by visitors, in place
and remotely, in close-up interactions and at a distance. Think, for exam-
ple, of first-time city visitors who browse through online social networks
to get recommendations on places to visit, events, restaurants, and bars, or
of local inhabitants who use Twitter to report on the quality of the local
bus transportation system. These examples clearly indicate how the way
in which people experience urban environments can be affected by their
interaction with the informational landscape across social media, both
locally and globally. Variously labeled by geographers and social scientists
the geoweb, spatial-social media, user-generated content, and volunteered
geographic information (VGI), such layers and applications could easily
be ascribed to the domain of neogeography (Graham and Zook 2013),
traditionally defined by the use of geographic techniques and tools by a
non-expert group of users, for personal and community activities.
Users can beat different times or even the same timeboth consum-
ers and producers of content. In this context, different kinds of software
arise to add a curatorial affordance, cutting across cyberspace as much as the
physical space of the city. Graham and Zook (2013) note that never before
have so many representations of the meaning of placeseither deliberate
commentaries or offhand byproducts of daily lifebeen so readily avail-
able for consumption and contestation. Such an overwhelming wealth of
depictions results from and at the same time encourages the simultaneous
emergence of software and social systems that sort and present vertical
selections of layered representations of places (Graham 2005; Zook and
Graham 2007c). Places and their experiences are increasingly defined by
dense and complex layers of representation that are created, accessed, and
URBAN SENSING: POTENTIAL ANDLIMITATIONS OFSOCIAL NETWORK... 255
The Urban Sensing project refers in its title to the possibility of building
new methods, relevant within urban studies, starting from the harvest
and visualization of big urban data. Representations of the urban
environment and of the urban experience can be constructedin this
example cartographicallystarting from information produced and
shared by citizens and visitors across social networking services. Citizens
are in fact co-producing big urban data, along with the physical and
sentient infrastructures of the city, and performing as sensors when they
witness phenomena and report about them, or just transmit sensations,
relative to their subjective experience of urban space, making them part
of the spatial social web. This chapter builds on the authors experience
as designers and researchers within Urban Sensing and provides materials
for scholars and researchers to reflect on the potential and limitations
of social network analysis and data visualization as research methods in
urban studies. The chapter starts with a few fundamental considerations
on the limitations and distortions inherent in any measurement and
technical mediation, considering the particular context of evaluations
stemming from quantitative analyses of big data. The chapter then moves
to mapping out precursory initiatives and projects that made use of the
spatial web to study the contemporary city. Subsequently, Urban Sensing
is introduced as a project through some of the experiments it allowed. Its
methodologies are explained in their limitations and potentialities, which
lead to the concluding reflections on the relevance in the field of urban
studies of sensing the urban through the social web.
EXISTING WORK
Starting from the mid-2000s, several initiatives and projects, either
conducted by research institutions (for example, CASA at University
College London, Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University,
or Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or
independent designers and design firms (for example, Christian Nold,
Art is Open Source, or Stamen Design), began to explore possibilities in
the spatial social web for description of the urban environment and the
experience of the city.
URBAN SENSING: POTENTIAL ANDLIMITATIONS OFSOCIAL NETWORK... 259
The work in this field has been influenced equally by artists, such as
the Situationistswho pioneered the cartographic representation of
a subjective spaceand by the work of scholars coming from differ-
ent disciplines, from geography, to urban studies, to computer science
(Zook and Graham 2007a; Girardin etal. 2008; Kotov etal. 2011; Liu
etal. 2011; Shi and Barker 2011). A significant part of these studies also
stems from the earlier work of Manuel Castells (1996), who reflects on
the relation between structured technical information and the global
expansion of capital, as well as from the work of Arjun Appadurai (1990),
who introduces the concept of mediascape to look at how media such as
television, radio, newspapers, and the narratives and images they produce
shape the world we inhabit.
Exploring similar issues but in specific relation to digital and interac-
tive information technologies, authors such as Stephen Graham, Mark
Graham, and Matthew Zook examine how digital data and information
coming from multiple sources (sensing technologies, ubiquitous comput-
ing, and user-generated content) play an important role in shaping urban
experiences (Graham 1998; Graham 2011; Zook and Graham 2007b,
2007a). Zook and Graham also note how the analysis of digital data pro-
duced by users can offer valuable insights into how inhabitants and visitors
perceive and live cities (Graham and Zook 2011). If used as a research
method, social media analysis can complement traditional methods for
analyzing users perceptions and activities in cities, such as surveys, inter-
views, or ethnographic observations. These methods generally require sig-
nificant economic resources and, as such, are generally limited to a specific
sample of city users, a specific geographic area, and a specific period of
investigation. Social media analysis can offer a complementary method
for this kind of study, especially if conducted through software platforms,
which allows the examination of a large number of data sets in real time
and in a semi-automatic way.
A key element for Urban Sensing has been how best to visualize the
information and the insights emerging from the social media analysis.
On the one hand, the software platform would generally deal with mas-
sive data sets, which were analyzed in real time, continuously producing
information. How best to render this real-time analysis through clear and
easy-to-understand visualizations was a paramount challenge of the proj-
ect. In this sense, Urban Sensings visualization strategies built on the
suggestions of a good number of authors and experts in visual design
(Bevington 2008; Heer and Shneiderman 2012; Bertin 1983; Tufte 2006;
260 L. SIMEONE AND P. PATELLI
Harris 2000; Segel and Heer 2010; Yau 2013). On the other hand, the
insights that Urban Sensing produced had a geo-located dimension and
it was therefore important to visualize these results on a set of maps. The
work of authors such as Mike Crang, Richard Schein, Denis Cosgrove,
and James and Nancy Duncan on emerging and collaborative carto-
graphic practices has provided a good grounding (Crang 1996; Schein
1997; Cosgrove 1999; Duncan and Duncan 2005). In Urban Sensing,
novel geographies are built out of heterogeneous content produced by
city users; real-time data are processed to produce knowledge that is visu-
ally explorable, in order to formulate new understandings of the city and
implement programs in the real world.
The platform has been tested in a set of twelve experiments (Simeone etal.
2012; Ciuccarelli etal. 2014; Simeone in print), conducted in collaboration
with potential end users (such as scholars in urban studies or architects and
urban planners, from both private companies and public offices). These
experiments wanted to check whether these end users considered mean-
ingful the results of the social media analyses as performed and visualized
by Urban Sensing.
In the following, we present one of the experiments conducted in 2013
for the city of Milan (Italy). In this experiment, we wanted to study the
Bovisa district, a specific area located north of the city center. Bovisa is an
old industrial area, which lost its economic centrality when, starting in
the 1950s, most of its factories were dismantled and moved farther from
the center. Today it is experiencing a period of renewal: many activities
have relocated into this area, including several departments of the schools
of Design, Architecture and Engineering of the Polytechnic University.
Bovisa is still undergoing a profound transformation and a wide array of
stakeholdersfrom the municipality, to service providers, private com-
panies, and real estate developersare interested in understanding how
inhabitants, commuters, and visitors perceive and live in this area of the
city. In this case, Urban Sensing was configured to track the number of
photos and contributions related to a specific geographic location and
shared over Flickr and Twitter, and the number of check-ins in Foursquare
for each venue in a pre-defined time lapse. The idea was to gather geo-
located information on the most crowded areas of Bovisa, on working
days and at weekends, and at different times of the day.
Figure 13.1 shows how the Urban Sensing platform plots the geographic
locations associated with Twitter contributions (blue dots) on a map of
Milan, also displaying temporal trends (for instance, the number of contri-
butions per day in the time span). It presents the geographic distribution
of tweets in Bovisa and in the neighboring districts, as collected between
24 June and 24 September 2013.2 The resulting map clearly displays the
areas where a higher concentration of tweets was published. The same
trends emerge even more clearly in Fig. 13.2, zooming in over the prem-
ises of the Polytechnic University. In Fig. 13.2 a further element is intro-
duced: while the blue dots represent the initial position of users, the green
and red dots show the positions of the same users immediately before and
after. By connecting the dots, users movements can be traced over time,
to provide insights not only on the most crowded areas of Bovisa, but also
262 L. SIMEONE AND P. PATELLI
Fig. 13.2 Urban Sensing, zoom over the area of Bovisa, in Milan (August
September 2013); elaborated by Marco Vettorello and Alex Piacentini
URBAN SENSING: POTENTIAL ANDLIMITATIONS OFSOCIAL NETWORK... 263
Flickr
Number of published images in a given geographic area in a pre-
defined time lapse.
Natural-language analysis of the textual description of the image
shared.
264 L. SIMEONE AND P. PATELLI
the citizens as well as the related urban areas portrayed within the platform
were not directly affected by the project itself, in the sense that the arti-
facts generated through Urban Sensing (for example, data visualizations)
never reached the actual spaces and the citizens it studied. In most of our
experiments, city inhabitants and visitorswhose social media contribu-
tions were being monitored and studiedwere not even aware of the exis-
tence of the software platform.
What if we introduced materials, objects, and designed artifacts into
the concrete field of urban perception? What if we tried to engage city
inhabitants and visitors in a more deliberate way? Interventions attempt-
ing to close the loop in the urban space could activate an involvement, an
interaction, and possibly offer new ways of inhabiting the city (DiSalvo
2012). In doing so, a project such as Urban Sensing, brought out and
into the messy realm of street life, could alter the conditions of the urban
experience. Its objects and artifacts, when experienced in their aesthetic
dimension as well as in their political potential, could produce new condi-
tions and urban experiences.
The aesthetic activity of the project could be extended to include other
spaces, times, and forms of activity. As argued by Jacques Rancire (2010),
what characterizes the aesthetic act in particular is that it introduces new
subjects and heterogeneous objects in a field of perception. The deploy-
ment and distribution of informational and aesthetic artifacts in the urban
realm would enable alternative ways to participate and take part in a com-
mon environment. This last point highlights a common limitation in the
ways in which Urban Sensing and big urban data analyses and data visu-
alizations can actually affect everyday life. In fact, if it is increasingly com-
mon to see such tools in the hands of managers and decision makers, only
more rarely do they allow the same legibility of urban phenomena to the
persons who are part of the depicted conditions. We see this as a seri-
ous shortcoming in using approaches such Urban Sensing as a research
method in urban studies.
CONCLUSIONS
In the specific perspective carried out in our project, urban studies were
closely linked to processes and practices of urban planning, design, and
management. Analyses emerging from Urban Sensing were providing city
administrators, urban planners, and architects with insights to be put into
action. Although this clearly offered some benefits, the reflections presented
268 L. SIMEONE AND P. PATELLI
in this chapter show first, the need to consider carefully the effects of
amplification and reduction in big urban data analysesthe fact that the
tools we choose to measure reality affect the working image resulting from
the processand second, the need to engage city inhabitants and visitors,
to make them aware of the use of such tools as research methods, and of the
visual and physical outputs of the research itself. Data appear to offer a truth
inherent to social and economic relations, and robust empirical evidence for
urban practice and political management; they are often seen as the source
of neutral and objective measurements of what is happening in the city, free
from any political ideology. At the same time, it is argued that data can only
portray a constrained reality, through specific narratives.
As part of his critical inquiry into the reality of the smart cityintended
as a managerial and pragmatic culture of the city mostly proposed by tech-
nology companies and embraced as a service by decision makersAdam
Greenfield (2013) shows how some easily measured value can only be
used as a proxy for a reality that is harder to quantify. Moreover, distor-
tions of ostensibly neutral results are inevitably entangled with the choices
made by an algorithms designers. Data are never just the data, and even
asserting this condition or otherwise is inherently political, an interested
decision. The emphasis, moreover, is very often put on the visual outputs
of contemporary imaging technologies, where a capacity to transform data
into image and its reversibility to transform image into data produce a new
set of possibilities. Such imaging technologies have a degree of construct-
ibility built into them. Through computational processes one can at one
level dial in different sets of dataas in tomography. Data are turned
into complex visualizations, and the latter move from scientific imaging
to the parallel burgeoning of similar imaging in the arts, communications,
contemporary media, and entertainment (Ihde 2009). In the enthusiasm
for the possibilities of knowledge that may emerge from the large amounts
of urban data finally available, the risk is producing a form of instrumental
realism, where what is made through these instruments would become
the real world. If cities can hardly be reduced to measurable phenomena,
Urban Sensing and technologies of big urban data can still provide useful
knowledge of urban systems and urban life, but a proper implementation
requires a critical understanding of what is being amplified and reduced.
In conclusion, we believe that social media analyses and visualizations
such as those that Urban Sensing produces can offer some value as a research
method in urban studies, in terms of highlighting particular city dynamics,
which can be further investigated using more traditional research methods.
URBAN SENSING: POTENTIAL ANDLIMITATIONS OFSOCIAL NETWORK... 269
NOTES
1. In 2015, 52.7 % of the global online population accessed the internet from
their mobile phone (http://www.statista.com/statistics/284202/mobile-
phone-internet-user-penetration-worldwide, all accessed 5 February 2016).
In 2015 there were around 1.96 billion social network users worldwide
( http://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-
social-network-users, all accessed 5 February 2016). According to Nielsens
2014 Digital Consumer Report (more specifically focused on the US mar-
ket), the monthly social media time spent per person on smartphone apps is
around 20 hours (http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/
en/reports-downloads/2014%20Reports/the-digital-consumer-report-
feb-2014.pdf, accessed 5 February 2016).
2. In Milan, the number of geo-localized tweets per day varies, but generally
ranges between 5000 and 9000. At the time of writing (February 2015), the
average number of tweets per day is 6.846.
3. Koskinen etal. define design experiments as pieces of design carried out as
a part of a research effort (2008, p.47).
4. We use the term stakeholder in a broad sense (Freeman 2010), to include all
the actors that affect or are affected by a specific process, project, or
organization.
270 L. SIMEONE AND P. PATELLI
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CHAPTER 14
NicolasBaya-Laffite andJean-PhilippeCointet
N. Baya-Laffite ()
Universit Paris-Est, Paris, France
e-mail: [email protected]
J.-P. Cointet
INRA, Paris, France
e-mail: [email protected]
Fig. 14.1 The semantic network configuring twelve topics of COP negotiations
as elicited from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB). Nicolas Baya-Laffite and
Jean-Philippe Cointet
Fig. 14.2 Absolute and relative presence of the twelve framework topics within
the COPs, 19952013. Nicolas Baya-Laffite and Jean-Philippe Cointet
276 N. BAYA-LAFFITE AND J. COINTET
over thirty countries who are in the field of each meeting and four permanent
IISD editors, is governed by a set of strict common standards and rules,
compiled in the ENB publishing style manual, that help neutralize, as much
as possible, any overt author biases. And thirdly, the reporting is structured.
By virtue of the writing rules, the daily reports are always presented in
the same template and using very formal language: there is a maximum
length of 18001900 words; each issue reportsafter an introduction and
a brief history of the negotiationson the official acts of the negotiations,
following them by theme or daily session; each paragraph addresses specific
conversations by paraphrasing, point by point, the arguments exchanged
between the participants; finally, a small section called in corridors reports
what is happening or being related outside the framework of the official
meeting. The result is a very structured, regulated presentation of contents
with topically coherent paragraphs.
Drawing on this source of text, we included in our corpus all avail-
able daily texts on negotiations taking place at the annual COP.Our cor-
pus starts in 1995, with the last session of the International Negotiating
Committee of the Convention (INC) and COP1, held that same year in
Berlin, and ends in 2013, with COP19in Warsaw. Other vol. 12 issues,
such as COP synthesis issues and issues from meetings other than the
COP, were excluded. Also, the corpus only kept the text strictly concern-
ing the reporting of the daily negotiations, removing all other text from
the bulletins, for example the introductory part where a summary of the
state of the negotiation process is presented or the credit part. The result
of this is a very structured but also relatively small corpus of text, which
can be kept under human control when processing using automated analy-
sis tools.
tools for empirical research that requires the processing of large textual
corpora and data sets, the CorText Digital Platform functions as a hub
of expertise in different relevant scientific and technical domains, ranging
from natural language processing, information retrieval, and knowledge
management to complex network analysis, scientometrics, and data visu-
alization. The software solutions designed and developed at CorText are
made available through a web application, the CorText Manager. Through
a single user-friendly interface, the application allows users to create and
manage their projects, upload and import textual corpuses and/or data
sets from different sources, run a wide range of analysis tools (scripts), and
get the results, including data visualizations, online.
Using this software, our methodological strategy for processing the
ENB corpus is twofold: first automatic text analysis and then semantic
network mapping of extracted terms.
The extracted list of noun phrases (also called n-grams) can include
terms made of one word (monograms). Excluding them is common prac-
tice, as single words tend to be neutral and therefore less informative.
However, in the climate negotiations many monograms (for example,
funding), as well as acronyms, initials, or abbreviations (for example,
CDM, for clean development mechanism), which are also monograms,
refer to important issues. Thus, when parameterizing the script, we decided
not to exclude monograms. While it is possible to limit the number of
terms to be extracted, we decided not to, thus letting the script extract
as many relevant terms as it found. In our case the automatic processing
resulted in a list containing 1178 noun phrases and monograms.
The identification of terms referring to issues in the negotiations, how-
ever, cannot solely rely on automatized analyses. While automatic multi-
terms extraction is a classic task in NLP, the algorithms used in this kind
of processing, where the analyst does not pre-define the categories to be
used, cannot provide totally satisfying results as regards the selection of
terms and the automatic normalization, stemming, and classification.
Thus, the second substep consists in a qualitative analysis and review of
the list of terms drawing on domain-specific knowledge, and in the light
of the specific criteria guiding the semantic analysis. As we will see next,
producing draft semantic network visualizations on the basis of draft lists
is necessary to support visual, qualitative analysis and exploration of the
co-word structure variations resulting from the exclusion or inclusion of
certain terms. This editing can be done online using the CorText CSV file
viewer and editor, or using a spreadsheet editor like Open Office to work
on the downloaded CSV file.
Thus, drawing on our own knowledge of climate negotiations and on
insights gained through traditional methods, including interviews and liter-
ature reviews, we reviewed, cleaned, and normalized the list. First, from the
1178 automatically extracted terms, we eliminated all terms that appeared
fewer than seven times in the corpus, as well as all terms that were not refer-
ring to identifiable matters of discussion. Thus, we did not keep countries
or terms that were too vague or ambiguous. For example, contact group
and ad hoc working group, both recurrent terms referring to spaces of
negotiation, were considered relevant by the algorithm, but we eliminated
them as we were only interested in the issues that these groups address.
Finally, we manually collated many acronyms, initials, or abbreviations with
their corresponding full forms (for instance, CDM and clean develop-
ment mechanism). Table 14.1 illustrates the extraction and gathering of
280 N. BAYA-LAFFITE AND J. COINTET
Table 14.1 Example of most frequent multi-terms in the list, with their main
form, multiple forms, and frequency
Main form Forms Frequency
What can these visualizations teach us about the life of topics in the
negotiations? The digital mapping process is based on what is available
elsewhere in textual form, in the ENB.This does not, however, mean
that visualizations bring nothing new: they bring new comprehensive
visual syntheses of the COP negotiations. And if the maps do not speak
by themselves, they have an affordance: they invite the reader to say
what is seen. Between interpretative potentiation and constraint, the
maps induce reflection on what they translate and mobilize: they trig-
ger discussions by an effect of surprise resulting from the confrontation
with something known, or something unusual, unexpected, or difficult
to explain in the images. One can identify on the graph a number of
moments in the case of the diachronic view, or terms in the case of a
synchronic view, whose meaning is well documented in the literature.
One can also wonder at many aspects of the graph (flow peaks, varia-
tions, links between nodes, size of nodes, clustering of some terms)
that require additional explanation. Thus, the confrontation with the
maps generates a productive feeling of perplexity that can trigger, in
various map-user arrangements, reflexive attitudes, both political and
epistemic, toward the map and what it represents.
MAPPING TOPICS ININTERNATIONAL CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS:... 283
The first confrontation with the map is the one that takes place with
the researchers producing it. And then comes a further challenge, that of
the experimenters regress (Collins 1992). Since methods and tools used
to produce the visualizations are experimental, we need to confront the
resulting maps with available knowledge on the mapped subject matter to
test their robustness.
We propose now to briefly illustrate this with a short narrative account
of the place and trajectories of topics pertaining to adaptation. Mitigation
and adaptation are the two main over-arching strategies of action defining
a controversial topic divide in the negotiations, whose form and evolu-
tion constitute one of the main objectives of the research discussed in
this chapter. As we and our colleagues have shown in detail elsewhere
(Venturini etal. 2014; Baya-Laffite and Cointet 2015), the maps demon-
strate the pre-eminence of mitigation-related topic conversations. As we
can see in Table 14.2, from the twelve topics identified in our semantic
network mapping, eight concern issues related to mitigation, three con-
cern issues related to adaptation, and one concerns issues relative to the
scientific foundations.
In the semantic network map (Fig. 14.1), all three clusters of expres-
sions linked to adaptation challenges are grouped at the center of the
semantic network, compared to other themes relating to mitigation that
are scattered around that center. Its centrality suggests its importance and
its connection to all the other negotiation topics. Our mapping, on the
other hand, confirms that the topic of vulnerability and adaptation (Fig.
14.3) has been a long-standing taboo in the UNFCCC process. Indeed,
such discussions arrived only in the 2000s. However, it also clearly shows
that debates on adaptation funding (Fig. 14.4) have been high on the
agenda from the very beginning.
This is consistent with the most recent literature review on the topic
(Khan and Roberts 2013). The fact that the issue of adaptation funding
consistently figures, with some exceptions, in the top positions throughout
the twenty years of negotiation is owed to pressure from the Alliance of
Small Island States (AOSIS) and Least Developed Countries (LDC) to
obtain the financial resources necessary to meet their adaptation needs.2
Yet, despite such efforts, the definition of policies to address the full costs
of adaptation to climate change impacts in the light of countries vulner-
abilities remained relatively marginal until the early 2000s, as the issue was
put on hold after the first COP in Berlin (Yamin 2005). The reason is to be
found, as documented in the literature, in the ambiguity that surrounded
the concept, both on the practical and normative levels (Schipper 2006).
284 N. BAYA-LAFFITE AND J. COINTET
Post-2012 and Bali Action Plan, building blocks, shared vision, long-term
REDD cooperative action, post 2012, historical responsibility, green climate
fund (GCF), fast-start financing, climate finance; mitigation actions,
nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs), measuring
reporting and verification (MRV), forest degradation, reducing
emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD);
REDD and the role of conservation, sustainable management of
forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing
countries (REDD+); methodological guidance, international
consultations and analysis (ICA), sectoral approaches, non-market
approaches, market approaches
Adaptation-related topics and terms
Impacts Climate change impacts, development, sustainable development,
poverty, poverty eradication, food, food security, agriculture, water,
water resources, ocean, ecosystem, financial flows, traditional
knowledge, human rights, climate justice, women, gender,
indigenous peoples, local governments, local communities
Vulnerability and Vulnerable, vulnerable countries, most vulnerable, small island,
adaptation extreme event, vulnerability and adaptation, adaptation actions,
mitigation and adaptation, adaptation technologies, Nairobi work
programme on vulnerability and adaptation; long term action,
Buenos Aires adaptation work programme, article 9, adaptation and
response measures, privileges and immunities, international
transaction log
Adaptation funding Funding, financial mechanism, operating entity, financing
adaptation, full costs, adaptation needs, importance of adaptation,
National adaptation programmes of action (NAPA), lack of
progress, new technologies, financial resources, Adaptation Fund,
adverse effects/impacts, adverse effect policy, policies and
measures, special climate change fund (SCCF), Global
environmental facility (GEF), Least developed countries (LCDs),
LCDs Fund, LCD expert group, Annex I national
communications, non-annex I national communications, education
On the one hand, impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation concern local gov-
ernment and therefore are hard to place as objects of collective action on
the global stage of the Convention. Besides, knowledge on these issues was
limited. On the other, the focus on impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation
appeared to many actors as an unacceptable excuse to avoid, and ultimately
renounce, ambitious mitigation objectives. The stream graph confirms that
in the period 20002004, following the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol
by the United States, the publication of the third IPCC report, and new
286 N. BAYA-LAFFITE AND J. COINTET
Fig. 14.3 Vulnerability and adaptation policy before 2004. Nicolas Baya-
Laffite and Jean-Philippe Cointet
Fig. 14.4 Adaptation funding before 2000. Nicolas Baya-Laffite and Jean-
Philippe Cointet
evidence that the efforts to reduce GHG emissions would not suffice to
avoid impacts in time so that systems would naturally adapt, there was an
adaptation turn in negotiations. The result is the predominance of the
adaptation funding topic over the whole 20002008 period (Fig. 14.5)
and an increase in the topic of vulnerability and adaptation between New
Dehli (COP8, 2002) and Poznan (COP14, 2008; Fig. 14.6).
MAPPING TOPICS ININTERNATIONAL CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS:... 287
Fig. 14.6 The high plateau of vulnerability and adaptation policy. Nicolas
Baya-Laffite and Jean-Philippe Cointet
climate change. The result of such conversations was the Buenos Aires
work program on adaptation and response measures (COP10, 2004),
with a two-track approach: one addressing the scientific, technical, and
socio-economic aspects, the other the improvement of information and
methodologies, concrete adaptation actions, transfer of technologies for
adaptation, and capacity building. The discussion continued the next year
in Montreal (COP11, 2005) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and
other extreme weather events, showing the non-invulnerability of indus-
trialized countries. The organization of COP12 in Nairobi, Kenya pro-
vided a new opportunity to call for urgent action on adaptation for the
most vulnerable countries. Results became visible both in terms of fund-
ing, with the governance structure of the Adaptation Fund almost final-
ized at that time, and in terms of policies, with the adoption of the Nairobi
work program for the implementation of adaptation. Yet, in spite of much
progress on the policy aspects, the definition of an official approach to
implementing adaptation funding came only after Bali (COP13, 2007),
with the end of a long-standing controversy spurred by the demand of the
oil-exporting countries for compensation for the reduced oil sales linked
to mitigation actions. Since the Bali COP, Parties were able to negoti-
ate in Poznan (COP14, 2008) the governance of adaptation funding and
policy mechanisms without such ambiguity. In 2009, adaptation issues
lost ground again. This can be explained by two factors. First, after the
failure of the Copenhagen Conference to impose new binding objectives,
the priority was on mitigation. Second, this topic seems to have gained
worldwide recognition in the discussions, as shown by the creation of a
mitigation committee and an adaptation framework between Cancun and
Warsaw. Its defenders complained less and started concentrating more
specifically on financing to make the necessary actions operational.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the maps discussed here are a product of the combination
of the tools and materials used and the decisions made when using them.
They are far from being a mechanical, automatic output of the tool box.
Far from being replaced by the machine, the researcher is constantly inter-
acting with its corpus and the outputs of the algorithms used to produce
and visualize the data. The resulting maps create a need to redeploy the
complexity by creating narrative accounts. A major asset of this represen-
MAPPING TOPICS ININTERNATIONAL CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS:... 289
NOTES
1. See http://www.iisd.ca/vol12 (accessed 10 March 2016).
2. It is, for example, on its demand that article 4.4 was added to the final text
of the 1992 Convention, stipulating: The developed country Parties and
other developed Parties included in Annex II shall also assist the developing
country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of cli-
mate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects.
3. See http://medea.medialab.sciences-po.fr/#/#unfccc and http://climaps.
eu/#!/narrative/mitigation-and-adaptation-in-the-unfccc-debates
(accessed 10 March 2016).
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CHAPTER 15
KatharinaLobinger
It has almost become a clich to open chapters and articles with the
diagnosis that visuals permeate our everyday environments not least
due to the digitalization of media and communication technologies,
which has enabled a neat integration of mobile communication, online
communication, and practices in consumer photography. Recently, the
fact that photography has become networked has caused a paradigmatic
shift in the debate about photography (Hand 2012), after an era in
which scholars were concerned with the crisis of reproduction and digital
photography. With photographs becoming networked, we witness a
proliferation of images not only in the mass media but also in our everyday
life-worlds. Hence, more than ever the field of visual communication needs
to develop theoretical and analytic tools for coping with the challenges of
the visual mode of communication. However, one contribution of visual
research has widely been neglected so far: visual communication research
is not only concerned with the analysis of visual material and the related
processes of production, reception, use, and effects. It also focuses on the
ways in which visuals can be used for research purposes.
K. Lobinger ()
University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
Those methods that use visuals for research purposes are often referred
to as visual methods, creative methods, or enabling methods. This is not
to say that such things as non-creative methods do exist. Of course, all
methods have to be insightfully and creatively designed in order to yield
new, fascinating, and, no less important, valid results. However, the term
enabling methods or creative methods specifically describes a broad
range of techniques that facilitate particularly deep and clear reflections
and discussion of research topics by providing participants with often
non-verbal opportunities to express themselves and to reflect on the
issues of interest (Arthur etal. 2014, p.160). Creative methodological
approaches, for example, rely on photo or video diaries, on digital story-
telling, on drawing-based exercises (for example, maps, networks, time
lines, thematic and non-thematic drawings), photo elicitation, or partici-
patory video production, or they work with prompts or sorting tasks and
many further techniques (Awan and Gauntlett 2011).
In this chapter a particular subgroup of enabling and creative tech-
niques is discussed: creative visual methods; that is, methods in which
visual material is used or produced during the research process. Originally,
visual methods were developed in visual sociology (Harper 1986) and
visual anthropology (Collier and Collier 1986; Collier 1957; Schwartz
1989). Recently they have also gained importance in visual communication
research (Lobinger forthcoming). As will be shown in this chapter, they
are particularly suited for audience studies in media and communication
research (see ONeill etal. 2013).
Visual methods can be used as stand-alone approaches. However, it
has been found very useful to combine them with open-ended interviews,
focus groups, or observations, where visual techniques can be very pow-
erful aids to interviewing [] helping to access views and behaviours that
are, for whatever reason, more difficult to verbalise, and bringing more
creative insight to the research topic (Arthur etal. 2014, p.169). They
can also be used in mixed-method approaches, combining qualitative and
quantitative research (see the example of Q-sort discussed later).
Since the verbal and the visual modes of communication hold very differ-
ent potentials, they also enable different forms of expression and reflection
during research processes. For example, images are particularly suited for the
representation of spatial relationships, while temporal information can be
better explained by the sequential verbal mode. This is why visual methods
can be efficiently used to create maps and drawings of relational structures,
such as social networks. Network research especially is taking advantage of
CREATIVE ANDPARTICIPATORY VISUAL APPROACHES INAUDIENCE... 295
this particular strength of the visual mode (see Gamper etal. 2011). It is
often argued that while textual communication is based on argumenta-
tion, visual communication is based on association (Mller 2007, p.13),
and particularly this associative nature of images makes them closer related
to feelings and emotions. While the grammar of the verbal mode presents
the pieces of information of a narration sequentially, pictures are perceived
holistically, even though their producers usually use (less formalized) repre-
sentational techniques for creating visual arguments (Hawhee and Messaris
2009, p.213). Also during the perception and reception of images we use
what can be called reading paths. However, these paths through the picture
are less structured compared to the paths pre-defined by the verbal mode:
Communication by association means that certain patterns and memorized
visual precursors (Vor-Bilder) are more or less spontaneously popping
up in the beholders minds, and that the rules that apply to visual mean-
ing creation are less standardized and more context-dependent than mean-
ing created and communicated in the textual mode (Mller 2007, p.13).
These associations and visual precursors increase the polysemy of images.
While, as will be argued in this chapter, visual polysemy represents a chal-
lenge for the analysis of the visual, it is a true treasure for analysis with visu-
als. Encouraging people to talk about pictures and letting them elaborate
on subjective meanings is a very productive technique in visual elicitation
studies. In general, creative visual methods often prove enjoyable and more
engaging (Buckingham 2009, p.648), even though this does not apply to
all participants in all situations.
There is some controversy over the question of how to examine the
visual data produced by the use of visual methods. While Arthur etal.
(2014) argue that visual outputs produced by participants serve the
purpose of eliciting verbal discussions rather than being primary data
on their own, Buckingham (2009) explicitly criticizes visual research-
ers for undervaluing the insights that can be gained from examining
the visual material produced during research. Accordingly, he demands
the development of methods to deal analytically with the visual dimen-
sions of this material, instead of only falling back on participants verbal
accounts (Buckingham 2009, p.648).
In the following, selected creative visual methods are discussed, with
particular emphasis on visual elicitation following different forms of par-
ticipatory approaches, on visual Q-sort studies and card sorting proce-
dures, and on creative drawing-based exercises. Each section starts with
an overview of the basic principles and the methodological scope of the
296 K. LOBINGER
VISUAL ELICITATION
Visual elicitation, the use of visuals during the interview process in qualitative
research, was first used and described by anthropologist John Collier (1957).
Collier originally used the terms photo elicitation and photo-interviewing
to describe a particular variation of open-ended interviews in which photo-
graphs are used as an aid to interviewing, with the scope of facilitating vivid,
deep and interesting talk (Harper 2002). In recent applications the term
visual elicitation is preferred to photo elicitation, because the visual material
used for the elicitation of verbal response is not limited to photographs but
can include visual material of all kinds, such as paintings, cartoons, advertise-
ments, diagrams, or videos (Pauwels 2012). Overall, visual elicitation refers to
the use of visual stimuli with the scope of elicitingusually verbalresponse
(Harper 2002; Lapenta 2012; Lobinger forthcoming).
In his groundbreaking work on the use of photographs in anthropolog-
ical research, Collier identified several advantages of photo-interviewing
that were later confirmed by multiple follow-up studies in the tradition of
his work. For example, interviews using photo elicitation are often longer
than purely verbal interviews without photographs. In this regard, Collier
also found that photographs can be stimulating and can help to over-
come the fatigue and repetition often encountered in verbal interviews
(1957, p.857). Visual elicitation does not only produce longer and more
vivid discussion. Due to the specific affordances of the different modali-
ties, images also elicit different kinds of information compared to verbal
questions (Harper 2002, p. 13). Collier (1957), for example, believed
that photographs give access to latent memory. Finally, photo elicitation
favors collaboration between researcher and respondent and can create a
non-directive discourse (Lapenta 2012, p.201; Collier and Collier 1986,
p.105). Particularly when respondents explore the meanings of the visual
material together with the researcher, the traditional questionanswer dis-
course structure of interviews is broken up, which reduces the hierarchy in
researcherrespondent relationships.
CREATIVE ANDPARTICIPATORY VISUAL APPROACHES INAUDIENCE... 297
asked them to explain the meaning those visuals had for them. Hence, the
narration about the pictures was the main source of information, not the
pictures themselves. However, we agree with Buckingham (2009) that
it is also important to examine the sequence of the visual material itself.
Therefore, we also conducted a picture-type analysis in which similar pho-
tographs of all interviewed couples were grouped into image types, which
were then interpreted with the help of iconographic-iconological analysis
(Grittmann and Ammann 2011). This procedure enabled us to identify
visual techniques of performing the social relationship that were then
related to the verbal narration of the couple.
The use of respondent-selected photographs had several advantages
for the study. As already noted by previous visual elicitation studies, the
photographs discussed proved to be ideal icebreakers within the inter-
view. The respondents used their photographs (see Fig. 15.1) as anchors
for storytelling (Van House 2009, p. 1082), embedding them in their
verbal narration and expanding on them where appropriate.3 In this way,
instead of merely explaining the contents of the photographs, the couple
and holistic way while at the same time providing replicability and a clear
structure (ONeill etal. 2013; Robinson etal. 2008; Stephen 1985; Davis
and Michelle 2011; Lobinger and Brantner 2015c).
For example, in order to explore what represents favorable visual
depictions of politicians in the view of media audiences, we conducted
a Q-sort study with forty participants. We used a forced-choice Q-sort,
asking the participants to sort a fixed number of items (thirty-three
photographs of a high-ranking European politician) into a fixed number
of categories, using a nine-point ranking scale from totally unfavorable
(4) to very favorable (+4) with a neutral middle category. Free
Q-sorts, on the other hand, do not limit the number of items per
category (Hess and Hink 1959). Moreover, our ranking scheme
demanded a quasi-normal distribution of items, which is characteristic
of Q-sort studies. Participants were thus allowed to place more items in
the middle categories than in the tails (see Fig. 15.2).
(Gamper etal. 2011). The most frequently used visual approaches, such
as network maps, network drawings, or network cards, can be created
with different degrees of standardization, from completely free drawings
to (semi-)standardized templates to be used by the participants. On the
continuum from openness to standardization, network drawings repre-
sent the most free and open approach. Respondents are asked to draw
their social environment and the people involved on an empty sheet of
paper according to their own ideas. Network cards, on the other hand,
use different degrees of standardization. For example, concentric circles
around the center, which represents the respondent, suggest different
degrees of relevance of the individuals within the network. Depending on
the degree of standardization, different analytic procedures are facilitated
(Gamper and Schnhuth in print). Similar to Q-sorts, these participa-
tory visualizations can be realized as paper-and-pencil, as paper-pen-and-
tokens, and as digital network maps or drawings (Gamper etal. 2011).
In the research project on visual communication in the couples
everyday communication (see earlier), the pair interview was opened with
a participatory task: the couples were asked to draw their communication
universe. We provided them with a scheme similar to network cards
(see Fig. 15.3) and asked them to position the media technologies and
contents that they used within this universe. The scheme allowed them
to highlight the individual relevance of the media for the partners and
to differentiate media that were important for their relationship from
media that were less important. With this task we wanted to find out how
important visual communication and visual media technologies were
in the couples ongoing conversation (Berger and Kellner 1964). The
drawing the participants created was very helpful during the interview. The
visualspatial representation of their communication universe facilitated
a focus on and explanation of their use of certain media contents and
technologies, while at the same time keeping an overview of the broader
repertoire of communication. In a similar approach, Hepp and colleagues
used open network cards in their media-ethnographic research exploring
the communicative social networks of young people. This visual approach
offered them deeper insights into the subjective representations of the
structural dimensions of media connectivity than verbal interviews alone
would have allowed. In this regard, Hepp and colleagues found that,
due to the drawing task, more aspects of media appropriation became
accessible to the respondents (Hepp etal. 2014, p.181).
304 K. LOBINGER
Fig. 15.3 The communication universe of a couple, both partners aged twenty-six.
The names of the interviewees have been removed as well as the description of the
drawing task in German, originally located above the universe
CONCLUSION
As was shown in this chapter, the use of creative visual methods, if employed
adequately, has many advantages regarding the research situation as well
as the results gained. Creative visual methods can be used to reduce the
hierarchy in researcherrespondent relationships. Verbal interviews usually
take the form of questionanswer settings in which the researcher, asking
questions, and the respondent, giving answers, interact. Metaphorically,
visual material can be described as a third interlocutor in this regard. Both
respondent and researcher look at and refer to the photographs, ideally
exploring them together. Visual material can thus create a less structured
atmosphere and reduced power hierarchies, leading to longer, more open
interviews that are also more enjoyable to participants.
Regarding the results of creative visual methods, there is wide agree-
ment that due to the idiosyncrasies of the visual mode, visual approaches
can carve out information that is often difficult to verbalize and thus not
accessible with verbal interviews alone. However, following Awan and
CREATIVE ANDPARTICIPATORY VISUAL APPROACHES INAUDIENCE... 305
NOTES
1. Further information on participatory approaches such as reflexive photography
or photo voice can be found in Lapenta (2012).
2. Several students in the seminar Mediatized Partner Communication at the
University of Bremen have assisted me in my study, recruiting respondents,
conducting interviews, and producing transcriptions. I am very grateful for
their enthusiastic and valuable contributions.
3. Photographs reproduced with permission. Even though the respondents
gave us permission to reproduce the photographs in scientific publications
without alteration, we decided to pixelate their faces in order to ensure ano-
nymity. This is only one of the many ethical challenges that arise when using
visual methods, which cannot be discussed here in detail (see, for example,
Pauwels 2008; Wiles etal. 2012a, b).
4. See, for example, http://qmethod.org/ (accessed 10 March 2016).
5. See http://eresearch.informatik.uni-bremen.de (accessed 10 March 2016).
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308 K. LOBINGER
S.Kubitschko()
University of Bremen (ZeMKI), Bremen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Kaun
Sdertrn University, Huddinge, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
Care for the Detail Methodological rigor is one of the pillars of academic
research, and part of it is the care for detail, when it comes to both data collec-
tion and analysis. Translating theoretical problems into empirically observable
categories as well as generating theory from observed social reality are among
the major challenges for every researcher. Part of this challenge is to elevate
everyday explanations of social phenomena beyond banalities. This requires
a thoughtful and in-depth engagement with the richness and details of the
objects of study. As Lewis Mumford puts it when he points to the analysis of
an ox moving over a winding, uneven road compared to the movement of a
planet: it is easier to trace an entire orbit than to plot the varying rate of speed
and the changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more famil-
iar object (Mumford, 2010[1934], p.47). Similarly, Lev Manovich asks in
his introduction to visualization for methods that allow for in-depth analysis
despite the abundance of information.
for example, makes a strong case for applying well-known methods to new
domains like online platforms and algorithms, which not only generates
knowledge about emerging issues and practices, but also contributes to
(re-)inventing methods.
Do Not Forget Where It Is Coming From Despite all the hype, we are
not necessarily at a turning point or entering a new era. Despite the dras-
tic transformations we are experiencing, yesterday the world looked just
a little different than it does today. Innovating methods is not a sudden
breakup, it is a perpetual effort. Of course, who would have foreseen only
a few years ago the rapid rise of big data mining or digital methods for
accepted research approaches in the humanities and social sciences? Yet,
as shown particularly by Alberto Frigo, methods do not emerge out of
nowhere and are constantly in the making. Embedding his approach in a
historical context, Frigo goes as far as envisioning lifelogging as a mean for
generating knowledgetechnical, empirical, maieutic, ethnographic, his-
torical, and criticalbeyond any fixed framework or dogma, but crafted
by any humanist to conduct his or her tracking. In this respect, lifelogging
as a method can be thought of as a way to deal with constantly increasing
complexity and to transform surroundings by proactively involving the
researcher producing data through everyday activities. To advance reward-
ing empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative methods need to
be continuously rethought, permanently adjusted, and to aim to get rid
of obsolete assumptions and noise. Having said that, it is essential to be
aware of the evolution and history of a given methodological approach.
Methods need to evolve and one needs to be aware of their roots; which
also means that innovation is not an end in itself. After all, the pace and
appropriation of innovating methods are what count.
Step Back and Reflect Taking the previous themes one step further,
methodological innovation needs to be linked with critical reflection that
questions the very categories of knowledge production. As has been argued
convincingly, social media data, for example, tend to have methodological
biases that favor a highly particular type of social analysis, and may even
call into question the relations between agencies of research (Marres and
Gerlitz 2015, p. 22). As Gray, Bounegru, Milan, and Ciuccarelli force-
fully demonstrate, as visualization tools and practices become more and
more ubiquitous, there is a need not only for the development of a crit-
ical hermeneutics, but also for new kinds of self-reflexive praxis for the
316 INNOVATIVE METHODS INMEDIA ANDCOMMUNICATION RESEARCH
Mind the Ethics and Politics On first sight, this volume does not explic-
itly cover the ethical dimensions of emerging research methods. While
research ethics is a topic of such importance that there is a need to discuss
its different facets more extensively, this volume does hint at some critical
facets.1 Emily LaDuein her methodologically oriented wakeup call to
visual and urban ethnographersshows that innovative methods always
also carry political meaning. Consequently, LaDue asks the sharp question
of who we produce our research for and for what purpose we mine data.
Luca Simeone and Paolo Patelli raise a similar point when they underline
that the citizens as well as the related urban areas portrayed within the
platform were not directly affected by the research project itself, in the
sense that the artifacts generated through Urban Sensing (for example,
data visualizations) never reached the actual spaces and the citizens it stud-
ied. Examining whether the work we do is being produced in common
and for a community in resistance, or whether we use our work for placing
ourselves on the market as academics, is key. How much does and should
empirical research feed back into society and influence or co-determine
social settings? This is an affirmation of the earlier call for critical reflection
when we advance methodological approaches, and it emphatically points
toward the ethical dimensions of empirical research in general. Simeone
and Patelli also reflect on an additional ethical dilemma. The production
of media content and mobile access to social networking services, both
necessary to share geo-located contributions, is still limited to a segment
of city inhabitants and visitors, let alone the world population. This raises
the (ethical) question: Who do we reach/research and who do we not?
Whose reality do we perceive and interpret? Finally, Simeone and Patelli
also accentuate that serious issues in terms of privacy need to be tackled
when researching contemporary media and/or communication phenom-
ena, since media are ever more embedded in peoples daily lives, habits,
rituals, behavior, and so on.
318 INNOVATIVE METHODS INMEDIA ANDCOMMUNICATION RESEARCH
A PROVOCATIVE OUTLOOK
Boldly summarizing some of the current trends in media and communi-
cation research, we want to point to two fundamental flawsinspired by
Lewis Mumfords classical inspection of Technics and Civilizationthat
relate more deeply to the relationship of technology and society. The first
flaw is the reduction of the complex to the simple by focusing on those
events that can be counted or measured and by displacing large chunks
of the living. The second flaw is a twofold neutralization of observers
in respect to the data with which they work and agents in respect to the
technical systems that they create to collect and analyze data. Mumford
skillfully related these developments to the formation of physical science
and the elimination of the organic (2010[1934], p. 46 and p. 47).
One could indeed phrase this in the following three provocations: What
remains human and social about the humanities and social sciences if they
are eager to apply the same principles and construct the same Weltbild that
the natural sciences advance and corporate research institutions glorify? Is
it advisable for disciplines that are generally confronted with spacetime
sequences that most of the time cannot be controlled, repeated, or investi-
gated in isolation to eliminate any form of speculation and interpretation?
Should the humanities and social sciences strive for predictive objectivity?
For several years nowand increasingly sosocial inquiry and analysis
in the context of media are no longer the exclusive province of researchers
employed by academic institutions. Marketing research has been around
for decades. Today, however, the commitment of corporately driven and
financed research has reached unprecedented heights. The research divi-
sions of large tech corporations gather excellent scholars in their labo-
ratories and maintain close collaborations with academic institutions
(for example, Microsoft Research, Laboratoire des Usages Orange Labs,
Research at Facebook, to name but a few large endeavors). One might
even go as far as to state that Academic research in a digital age has been
out-manoeuvred by freelance fact-makers in policy think tanks and cor-
porate research (Back 2012, p. 19). And something else has changed
over time: tech corporations are at the same time the objects of study, the
suppliers of large data sets, and increasingly research agents themselves.
In other words, corporations have turned into the trinity of methods: pro-
ducer, harvester, and analyst of data. Scholars are faced with the blurring
of boundaries between the tools, the objects, and the analyses; and they
will be so increasingly in the near future.
INNOVATIVE METHODS INMEDIA ANDCOMMUNICATION RESEARCH... 319
The fact that popular online platforms are now research agents in their
own right and determine who has the right to access what kind of data
brings with it restrictions and limitations. Corporations do not necessar-
ily have the duty to make their data publicly available. Accordingly, in
the context of changing application programming interfaces (API) and
privacy settings, emerging research methods can be difficult and resource
intensive (for example, technical know-how, skills, and experiences). Yet,
as shown throughout this volume, there are valuable approaches to tack-
ling these challenges (see also Hogan etal. 2016).
Etymologically, data is the (nominative) plural of datum, which is
Latin for something given or (thing) given. To stretch this instruc-
tion in Latin even further, datum is the neuter past participle of dare, to
give. As has been illustrated throughout this volume, data are not facts
somewhere out there for the taking. The process of giving is anything
but banal and/or neutral. So, when we approach the process of giving
from a critical point of view, we need to ask ourselves as researchers: Who
is giving, what is given, in what context is the giving taking place, how
do we receive and approach the given, and who do we give to? Taking
these provocations seriously, ultimately one is confronted not only with
the question What is (relevant) data?, but more fundamentally with the
questions How is knowledge generated?, How is knowledge diffused?,
How is knowledge interpreted?, and By whom and to what ends?.
NOTE
1. On ethics and qualitative research, see Nind et al. (2012); on ethics and
digital methods, see Hewson (2016); on ethics and big data research, see
Herman and Markham (forthcoming).
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320 INNOVATIVE METHODS INMEDIA ANDCOMMUNICATION RESEARCH
N
I Nietzsche, F., 3, 140
Ihde, D., 258, 268
P
J Parikka, J., 38, 39, 424, 52, 62
Jackson, J.L., 1703, 179 Patelli, P., 10, 25369, 312, 313, 317
Pauwels, L., 296, 297, 306n3
Pink, S., 5, 9, 40, 1615, 172
K Postill, J., 163, 196
Kavada, A., 190, 195
Kennedy, H., 244
Kitchin, R., 3, 82, 109, 110, 257 R
Kumar, N., 9, 20718, 312, 314, 316 Rendgen, S., 246n1
Rieder, B., 2, 228
Rogers, R., 5, 109, 244, 246, 276
L Rhle, T., 2, 228
LaDue, E., 9, 16784, 312, 314, 317 Ruppert, E., 2, 101, 107, 114, 118,
Latour, B., 78, 8793, 101, 274 229, 230
INDEX 323
S V
Sak, S., 8, 15, 5972, 312, 316 Velasco, P., 8, 77, 78, 99119, 312,
Sartoretto, P., 9, 189202, 312, 314 314
Sassen, S., 8, 1316
Savage, M., 12, 122, 250
Schwartz, R., 46 W
Segel, E., 243, 260 Wakeford, N., 4, 104, 119, 246, 314
Simeone, L., 10, 25369, 312, 313, Weber, R., 1246, 1304
317 Wiles, R., 4, 306n3
Snee, H., 4 Wilken, R., 40
Stephenson, W., 300 Wilson, M., 37, 38
T Y
Tkacz, N., 27, 244, 246 Yates, F., 6870, 148, 150
Tufekci, Z., 84, 192, 201 Yau, N., 246n1, 260
Tufte, E., 231, 233, 237, 238, 242,
243, 246n1, 259
Z
Zook, M., 38, 254, 255, 259
Subject Index
city, 1416, 40, 456, 679, 106, cryptocurrency, 8, 99, 100, 102, 103,
16784, 25461, 2638, 273, 317 1057, 115
code, 23, 28, 8991, 99, 105, 106, cyber
109, 119n2, 152, 233, 235, 300 cybernetic, 83, 86, 243
coding, 38, 52, 87, 109, 238 cyberspace, 59, 60, 254
commercial, 29, 38, 52, 54, 84, 142,
155
communication, 111, 30, 37, 5972, D
101, 12334, 179, 189, 207, data, 2, 17, 38, 60, 84, 101, 128, 142,
228, 253, 285, 293, 311 172, 192, 207, 22747, 25369,
computer, 82, 91, 101, 105, 117, 274, 295, 314
119n4, 141, 142, 152, 222, 224, design, 11, 16, 24, 41, 44, 52, 59, 68,
278 70, 77, 824, 86, 99, 100, 114,
concept, 8, 39, 40, 42, 59, 63, 65, 70, 12931, 152, 1624, 167, 183,
82, 83, 94, 95n4, 102, 146, 150, 197, 209, 237, 239, 2424, 246,
158, 172, 175, 176, 183, 184, 258, 259, 265, 267, 305
258, 283 device, 1, 8, 10, 82, 83, 94, 101, 102,
conceptualization, 8, 125, 191, 202 104, 107, 109, 110, 114, 115,
connect 118, 119, 1413, 149, 1535,
connection, 27, 61, 102, 106, 127, 189, 192, 202, 208, 21012,
129, 266, 281, 283 215, 217, 218, 22747, 253,
connectivity, 9, 60, 77, 1248, 254, 257
1304, 254, 303, 316 digital, 1, 17, 42, 59, 99119, 142,
construct, 124, 133, 183, 200, 305, 171, 189, 207, 228, 254, 274,
318 293, 312
construction, 70, 169, 172, 202, digital methods, 76, 100, 109, 110,
299, 305 117, 118, 228, 244, 289, 315,
context, 3, 6, 9, 1722, 31, 32, 38, 319n1
39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 63, 65, 70, discursive, 1, 167, 168, 183, 276,
90, 91, 94, 145, 153, 156, 163, 297
181, 190, 1937, 199, 202,
20711, 214, 218, 228, 231,
236, 238, 244, 246, 254, 256, E
263, 266, 280, 299, 305, effect, 15, 37, 41, 435, 51, 76, 102,
31316, 318, 319 130, 140, 178, 258, 268, 285,
critical, 26, 10, 11, 14, 38, 42, 45, 293
524, 78, 84, 86, 88, 92, 127, empirical, 14, 7, 8, 10, 13, 18, 20,
130, 156, 157, 168, 177, 192, 38, 40, 44, 53, 64, 769,
213, 22747, 268, 312, 313, 99119, 145, 157, 172, 1958,
315, 317, 319 200, 201, 268, 278, 31216
INDEX 327
ethnography, 9, 86, 92, 144, 158, 208, 230, 233, 234, 236, 246,
1615, 16784, 189202, 210, 247n3, 256, 258, 313
234 Instagram, 39, 457, 4954, 55n9,
autoethnography, 144, 145, 158 221, 255, 260
experiment, 8, 17, 18, 21, 28, 29, 32, interaction, 3, 9, 1517, 38, 425,
424, 54, 759, 88, 129, 131, 602, 65, 69, 77, 103, 109, 110,
142, 152, 196, 201, 255, 256, 115, 12334, 149, 183, 196,
2607, 312 202, 212, 254, 257, 258, 264,
267, 312
internet, 5, 23, 61, 62, 75, 76, 1002,
F 106, 11215, 163, 164, 192,
Facebook, 457, 81, 84, 8792, 102, 217, 253, 266, 269n1, 274
110, 189, 201, 254, 255, 260, interview, 9, 67, 85, 87, 173, 177,
266, 318 179, 181, 189, 192, 197, 198,
Flickr, 46, 255, 260, 261, 2635 20718, 221, 229, 234, 236,
flow, 60, 102, 105, 124, 126, 129, 244, 259, 279, 281, 294,
132, 133, 145, 155, 171, 235, 296300, 3025, 306n2
238, 260, 282, 285 issue-framing, 274
Foursquare, 254, 255, 260, 261,
2635
K
knowledge, 2, 3, 8, 9, 17, 19, 213,
G 27, 28, 31, 32, 61, 69, 79, 81,
global, 14, 60, 112, 170, 174, 181, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 107,
182, 195, 235, 253, 259, 273, 109, 118, 13941, 144, 145,
285 14951, 1557, 163, 16772,
Google, 76, 89, 92, 142 17982, 192, 193, 200, 202,
217, 233, 234, 239, 242, 257,
260, 264, 269, 278, 279, 281,
I 283, 285, 299, 305, 311, 313,
information, 4, 18, 43, 59, 83, 101, 315, 319
125, 139, 167, 190, 208, 228,
253, 278, 294, 314
information and communication L
technologies (ICT), 59, 60, 190, lifelogging, 9, 78, 13958, 315
209, 218, 253 limitation, 10, 41, 52, 54n4, 62, 87,
information and communication 100, 109, 125, 130, 168, 215,
technology and development 229, 25369, 284, 319
(ICTD), 209, 210, 218 local, 14, 43, 47, 60, 174, 175, 177,
infrastructure, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 16, 29, 184, 200, 214, 254, 263, 274,
70, 78, 92, 103, 105, 111, 114, 285
328 INDEX
M N
map, 8, 10, 64, 65, 77, 100, 10513, network
11517, 134, 155, 192, 196, network analysis, 10, 76, 77, 103,
223, 231, 238, 257, 260, 261, 243, 25369, 274, 278, 2802,
264, 27783, 288, 289, 294, 302
303, 316 networked, 78, 89, 914, 100, 101,
mapping, 105, 110, 146, 256, 264, 114, 125, 134, 293
27390, 312 neural, 8, 9, 78, 12334
marginalized, 9, 19, 190, 210, 218,
282
material O
materialist, 8, 38, 39, 41, 434 observation, 5, 24, 424, 51, 67, 78,
materiality, 7, 8, 1316, 61, 101, 81, 83, 87, 88, 101, 106, 115,
190, 312 127, 148, 170, 172, 191, 199,
media 259, 294
media ecology, 8, 38, 39, 415, 197 online, 1, 3, 5, 213, 26, 63, 75, 118,
media environment, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 128, 154, 163, 164, 189, 192,
227, 311, 316 216, 224, 225, 244, 254, 276,
media landscape, 4, 207 278, 279, 289, 293, 315, 319
media practice, 10, 53, 1947,
2002, 208, 21011, 217, 218
mediation, 8, 53, 75, 90, 22831, P
23344, 246, 256, 316 participant
medium, 65, 189, 1947, 200, 201, participation, 14, 26, 28, 29, 33n3,
317 42, 77, 191, 192, 195,
multimedia, 161, 196 198202
method participatory, 8, 10, 17, 19, 22,
methodological, 28, 10, 3944, 197, 266, 293306, 312
53, 768, 82, 93, 104, 105, photograph, 26, 39, 457, 49, 51, 52,
107, 110, 124, 168, 169, 176, 54n7, 223, 293, 2969, 301,
184, 1925, 197, 209, 210, 304, 306n3
212, 228, 234, 263, 274, 278, photographic, 446, 49, 52, 164,
285, 289, 294, 295, 297, 305, 171
312, 314, 315, 317 physical, 1, 41, 607, 71, 83, 104,
methodology, 4, 5, 757, 1024, 105, 107, 152, 157, 200, 207,
114, 139, 148, 157, 164, 168, 212, 216, 224, 254, 256, 268,
189202, 208, 234, 236, 300 318
mixed-method, 294, 316 place, 3, 3755, 59, 86, 100, 127,
mobile, 37, 38, 46, 192, 208, 253, 144, 169, 191, 210, 237, 254,
293, 317 277, 301, 314
mobile phone, 164, 189, 196, 199, platform, 1, 8, 23, 38, 45, 46, 52, 53,
21012, 215, 217, 257 81, 82, 84, 102, 103, 109, 110,
INDEX 329
128, 142, 175, 178, 189, 195, 281, 288, 294, 299, 302, 303,
196, 201, 202, 2346, 238, 244, 305
255, 25961, 2637, 269, 315, resource, 6, 20, 21, 29, 31, 32, 78,
317, 319 105, 106, 119, 173, 175, 176,
politics, 17, 20, 37, 51, 63, 110, 167, 190, 193, 194, 200, 201, 230,
170, 172, 173, 176, 180, 183, 231, 235, 257, 259, 283, 285,
184, 192, 229, 234, 236, 317 297, 313, 317, 319
political, 2, 810, 24, 38, 42, 447,
513, 63, 64, 78, 84, 99, 100,
103, 109, 110, 118, 151, 155, S
157, 158, 16876, 179, 180, science and technology studies (STS),
1824, 18993, 195, 196, 201, 4, 78, 101, 234
202, 222, 228, 231, 235, 255, smart city, 14, 258, 268
267, 268, 273, 282, 284, 289, smartphone, 37, 49, 53, 142, 152,
312, 317 254, 269n1
power, 14, 23, 64, 82, 89, 90, 115, social media, 38, 44, 45, 49, 53, 60,
117, 130, 155, 168, 170, 171, 66, 768, 81, 82, 90, 141, 142,
173, 178, 1802, 184, 212, 304 155, 156, 164, 177, 183, 192,
private, 84, 183, 214, 261, 265, 284 196, 199, 221, 222, 244, 254,
privacy, 95n1, 102, 103, 139, 164, 255, 257, 25961, 263, 264,
217, 218, 264, 266, 317, 319 2669, 276, 315
public, 8, 32, 38, 60, 81, 99, 139, social network, 10, 61, 63, 76, 102,
176, 201, 212, 229, 258, 276 192, 201, 25369, 294, 302,
303
software, 1, 10, 16, 224, 82, 859,
Q 95n2, 1002, 105, 129, 157,
Q-sort, 10, 294, 295, 299302 2336, 238, 239, 241, 242, 246,
qualitative, 5, 10, 20, 77, 192, 209, 254, 255, 259, 260, 267, 277,
212, 217, 218, 229, 266, 274, 278, 281
279, 294, 296, 300, 302, 315, space, 13, 15, 16, 20, 22, 28, 37, 38,
319n1 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53,
quantitative, 9, 10, 20, 208, 209, 212, 5971, 102, 117, 118, 140,
217, 218, 229, 242, 256, 266, 1513, 1738, 181, 184, 191,
274, 294, 300, 302, 315 199, 200, 211, 212, 237, 244,
256, 258, 259, 263, 2657, 269,
279, 317
R spatial, 8, 15, 37, 39, 59, 62, 646,
reflexivity, 9, 76, 16784, 212, 228, 68, 70, 71, 146, 157, 196,
231, 245, 316 200, 256, 258, 264, 266, 294,
reflective, 38, 47, 144, 170, 312 303
representation, 20, 52, 62, 105, 117, standard
193, 207, 228, 229, 233, 254, standardization, 303
256, 259, 260, 262, 264, 274, standardized, 105, 295, 303
330 INDEX
strategy, 8, 10, 29, 39, 41, 435, 49, Twitter, 55n9, 63, 81, 84, 90, 102,
53, 64, 66, 77, 93, 101, 128, 110, 189, 254, 255, 260, 261,
165, 167, 172, 182, 1902, 263, 264
1957, 200, 222, 259, 265, 274,
27782
study, 2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 18, 19, 3941, U
53, 61, 63, 69, 82, 87, 88, 90, urban, 4, 810, 1416, 3755, 59, 60,
92, 94, 95n1, 104, 130, 131, 62, 63, 679, 71, 111, 112, 167,
151, 156, 162, 164, 165, 168, 175, 176, 183, 184, 201,
16971, 173, 179, 180, 1824, 210, 211, 243, 25369, 312,
193, 194, 202, 21012, 215, 316, 317
218, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231, user-generated, 52, 221, 222, 254,
23346, 256, 259, 261, 276, 255, 259, 260, 263, 266
297, 298, 3002, 312, 314, 318
studying, 15, 3755, 67, 82, 92,
153, 165, 169, 173, 177, V
17983, 210, 217, 22931, value, 7, 8, 14, 18, 20, 21, 32, 43, 46,
233, 234, 236, 239, 244, 246, 47, 51, 52, 63, 86, 87, 89, 92,
265 94, 100, 103, 105, 132, 178,
systems, 1416, 23, 65, 813, 858, 179, 181, 183, 191, 215, 230,
92, 93, 1035, 110, 112, 146, 237, 242, 268, 278, 316
150, 153, 191, 196, 223, 234, video, 66, 93, 133, 145, 154, 164,
236, 254, 258, 268, 284, 286, 171, 196, 199, 211, 2213, 225,
318 235, 254, 294, 296, 305, 316
virtual, 1, 22, 53, 62, 65, 68, 70, 71,
152
T visibility, 39, 41, 46, 47, 51, 53, 84,
technology, 4, 5, 79, 13, 15, 22, 24, 88, 193, 211, 282
39, 43, 759, 868, 100, 101, visuals, 2939, 302, 305
124, 139, 140, 142, 1502, 155, visualization, 7, 10, 2215, 22831,
171, 192, 194, 200, 202, 208, 2339, 242, 243, 245, 246,
210, 211, 215, 217, 224, 242, 25369, 274, 278, 281, 282,
258, 268, 278, 280, 284, 312, 312, 314, 315
316, 318
test, 14, 16, 103, 124, 126, 127, 132,
142, 283 W
testing, 92, 125, 127, 128, 132, wiki, 8, 14, 16, 17, 2132, 313
149, 265, 274, 314
theory, 4, 5, 9, 17, 40, 117, 1246,
132, 133, 163, 169, 170, 173, Y
190, 1946, 202, 314 YouTube, 93, 221, 222