Digital Issue Mapping

An epistemological experiment:
issue mapping, data journalism
and the public understanding of
complex issues
27th October 2014, Utrecht Data School, Utrecht University
Liliana Bounegru | lilianabounegru.org | @bb_liliana!
Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org | @jwyg

Gray, J., Bounegru, L. & Chambers, L. (2012) The Data Journalism Handbook.!
Available at: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/

Rogers, R. (2013) Digital Methods.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“An epistemological experiment”

social
science
researchers
leading
digital
newsrooms
new ways of
covering
complex issues
+ =

social
science!
researchers
leading
digital
newsrooms
new ways of
covering
complex issues
+ =

Using digital traces to study the social:
actor-network theory, issue mapping,
digital methods

“[T]here is nothing specific to social order; (…) there is no
social dimension of any sort, no social ‘context’, no distinct
domain of reality to which the label ‘social’ or ‘society’ could
be attributed; (…) no ‘social force’ is available to ‘explain’
the residual features other domains cannot account for (…)
and (…) society, far from being the context ‘in which’
everything is framed, should rather be constructed as one of
the many connecting elements circulating in tiny conduits”
– Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory (2005)

“The social is visible only by the traces it leaves..”
– Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory (2005)

“The interest of electronic media lies in the fact
that every interaction that passes through them
leaves traces..”
– Bruno Latour & Tommaso Venturini, “The Social Fabric:
Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods” (2009)

Digital methods are “methods of the medium”
designed to repurpose digital objects such as
tags, likes, links and hashtags to study issues.
– Digital Methods Initiative,
University of Amsterdam

Three examples:!
1. climate change negotiations!
2. rise of the far right in Europe!
3. health worker migration

Example #1:!
mapping dominant topics and
countries in UN climate
negotiations

EMAPS (2014) “Climaps: A Global Issue Atlas of Climate Change Adaptation”!
Available at: http://climaps.org/

“In what seems like a flash, the climate-change
debate has lurched from talk of mitigation to
one of adaptation.”
– Leo Hickman, “Can carbon offsetting ever be truly green?”,
The Guardian, 3rd September 2008.

The Atlantic (2014) “The UN's New Focus: Surviving, Not Stopping, Climate Change”.
Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/the-uns-new-focus-surviving-not-stopping-
climate-change/359929/

Can the shift from mitigation to adaptation be
observed in the UNFCCC negotiations?

Venturini, T., Baya-laffite, N., Cointet, J., Gray, I., Zabban, V., & De Pryck, K. (2014) “Three Maps and Three
Misunderstandings : A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy.” Big Data and Society, 2014, 1(1).
Available at: http://medialab.sciences-po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/

Findings!
Mitigation is more dominant - the majority of
the clusters are about mitigation.
Mitigation is much more diverse and
distributed.
Adaptation is a much more tightly clustered
topic and highly connected to other topics.

Findings!
Both adaptation and mitigation are highly
visible in negotiations.
Adaptation financing has been central to
climate negotiations from the outset.
There is a noticeable shift towards adaptation
during the period we examined.

Which countries intervene most in UN climate
negotiations and how do these interventions
evolve over time?

Graphing the number of interventions in the
negotiations of the 21 most active countries
based on daily summaries from the Earth
Negotiations Bulletin (ENB)

Findings!
Notable stability in presence and intervention
of countries.
Notable exceptions include Bolivia and
Philippines who are becoming more prominent
in recent negotiations.
Most active are China (representing G77),
United States and Europe.
Countries tend to be more active when they
host the negotiations.

Wired Italia (2014) “Cambiamenti del clima: 20 anni di conferenze”. March 2014. No. 60.

Wired Italia (2014) “Beautiful Information, in mostra le migliori infografiche di Wired”.
Available at: http://www.wired.it/attualita/media/2014/03/04/beautiful-information-infografiche-wired/

Example #2:!
mapping the rise of the far right
in Europe with the web and
social media

The Guardian (2013) “The rise of far right parties across Europe is a chilling echo of the 1930s”.
Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/15/far-right-threat-europe-integration

Huffington Post (2014) “Sudden Rise of Far Right Groups in EU Parliament Rings Alarm Bells Across
Europe”. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elinadav-heymann/sudden-rise-of-far-right-
_b_5512961.html

New York Times (2014) “Populist Party Gaining Muscle to Push Britain to the Right”.
Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/world/europe/populist-party-gaining-muscle-to-push-britain-
to-the-right.html

What are the recruitment methods
of far right groups?

Are current recruitment counter-measures
proving effective?

What kinds of issues are most active
amongst far right groups?

How are far right extremist groups connected
to populist right and other right wing groups?

Profiles for 13 European countries.

1. List of links per country
2. Analyse links between them
3. Study issues and actors

Findings
New issues (e.g. environment, anti-globalisation
and rights), principles and
recruitment techniques.
Counter-measures are outdated.
!
Islamophobia is located primarily in the North.

Greece: blood and soil and organic markets

Rogers, R. et al (2013) “Right-Wing Formations in Europe and Their Counter-Measures: An Online
Mapping”. Digital Methods Initiative. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/RightWingPopulismStudy

Hungary: horse and yurt recruitment festivals

Counter-Jihadist groups on social media

The Guardian (2012) “Far-right anti-Muslim network on rise globally as Breivik trial opens”.
Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/14/breivik-trial-norway-mass-murderer

Hope Not Hate (2012) “Counter-Jihad Report”.
Available at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/counter-jihad/

Are different Counter-Jihadist groups in
Europe connected? If so how?

Digital Methods Initiative. “Counter-Jihadist Networks: Mapping
the Connections Between Facebook Groups in Europe.”

Findings
Facebook is an important medium for extremist
groups.
!
Three main clusters based on geographical
proximity.
!
European Counter-Jihadist groups are networked
and transnational.

Findings!
!
Offline leaders are active on Facebook.
!
There are also new emerging online leaders.
!
New technique for identifying online leaders.

Example #3:!
who’s talking about health
worker migration?

Mills et al (2008). “Should active recruitment of health workers from !
sub-Saharan Africa be viewed as a crime?”. Lancet 2008; 371: 685–88.

The Guardian (2011). “Assessing the cause and effect of health worker migration”.!
Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/global-health-workers/health-workers-move-from-area-of-origin

“Health worker migration is a big issue – in
2005, it was widely reported that there were
more Malawian doctors in Manchester than
Malawi. Now, it seems, there are more Ethiopian
doctors in Chicago than in Ethiopia.”
– Sue George, “Assessing the cause and effect of health
worker migration”, The Guardian, 18th January 2011.

“[a 2010 global code of practice] sets out
guiding principles and voluntary international
standards for recruitment of health workers, to
increase the consistency of national policies
and discourage unethical practices”
– Sue George, “Assessing the cause and effect of health
worker migration”, The Guardian, 18th January 2011.

Which actors in the UK health sector are
talking about the migration of health workers?

Rogers, R., Sanchez Querubin, N. & Kril, A. (2015) Ageing Places: A Digital Issue Mapping.
Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

Findings for UK!
Notable difference between sectors.
Most vocal are government and academia.
Less discussion amongst healthcare NGOs.
Next to no discussion in private sector.

Who is recruiting Polish health workers?

Findings for Poland!
!
Demand for Polish care workers greater
outside country than within.
!
Based on recruitment postings, Poland looks
to be susceptible to care drain.

Digital Methods Initiative (2014) DMI Tools.!
Available at: http://tools.digitalmethods.net

Sciences Po Media Lab (2014) “Tools we develop and tools we use”!
Available at: http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/

“Netvizz is a tool that extracts data from
different sections of the Facebook platform
(personal profile, groups, pages) for research
purposes.”

Rieder, B. (2013). Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application. In WebSci '13
Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 346-355). New York: ACM.

Netvizz: https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/facebook/netvizz/

“The Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset
(DMI-TCAT) captures tweets and allows for
multiple analyses (hashtags, mentions, users,
search, ...).”

Borra, E. & Rieder, B. (2014) “Programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing
tweets”. Aslib Journal of Information Management. Vol. 66 No. 3: 262-278.

TCAT: https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDmiTcat

“The Issue Crawler is web network location
and visualisation software. It consists of
crawlers, analysis engines and visualisation
modules.”

“A software tool that locates and visualizes
networks on the web”

Issue Crawler: https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolIssueCrawler

“Gephi is an interactive visualization and
exploration platform for all kinds of networks
and complex systems, dynamic and
hierarchical graphs.”

Which of these techniques might
be of interest in journalism?

i. Co-occurrence analysis to identify themes
!
ii. Network analysis to identify actors and
sources
!
iii. Hyperlink analysis to explore “politics of
association”
!
iv. Resonance analysis to identify source
partisanship

social
science
researchers
leading!
digital!
newsrooms
new ways of
covering
complex issues
+ =

Emerging practises and epistemologies
of data journalism

Geeks vs. pundits: !
The clash of two epistemological cultures

"Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president
is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73
percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of
winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it’s the same thing. .
. . Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a toss-up
right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from
typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10
days, because they're jokes." (Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, 2012)

“I am Nate Silver, the Lord and God of the Algorithm!” (Jon
Stewart, 2012)

The life of data in the newsroom

“Objects, too, have agency”
– Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:
An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005)

What journalistic practices, values and
visions are articulated around the use of
data as raw material for reporting?
How are traditional journalistic practices,
values and norms, transformed?

The politics of quantitative
methods in the newsroom

Where do journalists’ attachments to
particular forms of quantitative analysis
come from?
How are these commitments articulated?
How do they shape the process of
knowledge production and its outcomes?
What quantitative methods are being left
out? (the question of alternative histories)

Rieder, B (2013) “Interactive visualization and exploration of network data with Gephi”. Presentation from
DMI Summer School. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/digitalmethods/gephi-rieder-23834788

social
science
researchers
leading
digital
newsrooms
new ways of!
covering!
complex issues
+ =

How might digital and tools methods for
issue mapping be used in journalism to
improve coverage of complex issues?

Paper for Tow Center for
Digital Journalism

Interviews and discussions with journalists in
Europe and US about issue mapping and
digital tools and methods

Some preliminary findings and reflections…

Some different potential uses of digital methods in journalism:
!
• Story discovery (news desk/projects)
• Internal reference resource (news desk/projects)
• Preparation for live coverage (news desk/projects)
• Quick/easy tools for journalists (news desk/projects)
• Presentational device (interactive/graphics)
• Interactive news “toys” for exploration (interactive)

Some challenges to using digital methods in journalism:
!
• Time, resource and budget constraints
• Resistance to change in (especially bigger) newsrooms,
hard to introduce new tools/methods
• Social scientists often want to capture complexity,
journalists often want to simplify
• Tension between traditional journalistic values (recency,
human interest, etc) and research values
• Rendering complexity readable and accessible to broader
publics - not just issue experts/researchers
• Keeping interactive projects about current events up to
date
• Not just tool provision, but also training
• Transparency of tools and interpretation of results
• Some of tools are complex to install and no web version
available
• Speed of using tools as events unfold
• Efficiency of these methods compared to others
• Hard to find stories in data

Some opportunities for using of digital methods in journalism:
!
• Interest in using tools from interactive teams
• More newsrooms have been experimenting with related
approaches, still at very early stage
• Potential for researchers working with journalists (rather
than issue experts) to help with selection, filtering, framing
and narration
• Introducing robust methodology around use of social
media data in newsrooms
• Identifying human sources for interviews.
• New forms of analysis and verification of sources.
• Hyperlink analysis and web data currently very rarely used
in journalism
• Low uptake of text-mining and scientometrics tools and
methods
• Input/feedback from journalists could feed into existing
software development
• New web versions of existing tools (e.g. Gephi)
• Using social media and web as data, not just content (to
look at relationships and interactions)

Next steps:
• Preliminary report for Tow Center
• Embedded experiments in newsrooms
• Pilot around Paris 2015 climate negotiations
• Toolkit and handbook for journalists

Thank You!
Liliana Bounegru | lilianabounegru.org | @bb_liliana
Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org | @jwyg
Sciences Po médialab
http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/
!
Sciences Po médialab - Tools
http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/
Digital Methods Initiative
https://digitalmethods.net
Digital Methods Initiative - Tools
https://tools.digitalmethods.net

Digital Issue Mapping

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