DECENTRING DEVICES: Developing Quali-Quantitative Techniques for Studying Controversies with Online Platforms David Moats Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2015 1 DECLARATION I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Wherever contributions of others are involved, these are clearly acknowledged. David Moats 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As STS scholars are well aware, any research project is always a distributed accomplishment, but this is more obviously the case in the Wild West of digital research. Firstly, I am grateful to the ESRC for funding such an experimental project and of course to my brilliant supervisors Noortje Marres and David Oswell who set the bar very high and continued to make insightful and challenging comments throughout. I could not have asked for a better pair of voices jostling in my head. A different version of the argument in Chapter II and the tool developed in Chapter VI have appeared in the article Mapping Controversies with Social Media: The Case for Symmetry with Noortje Marres (2015). I also want to thank the entire team at the Digital Methods Initiative and the Média Lab for their support, both technical and intellectual. I have benefitted considerably from discussions with Richard Rogers, Tommaso Venturini, Bernhard Rieder, Sabine Niederer and Carolin Gerlitz. A collaboration with Erik Borra led to the creation of the URL sequencer in Chapter VI, which he was kind enough to incorporate into the DMI TCAT interface. Gabriele Colombo, Federica Bardelli, Carlo di Gaetano and Alessandro Brunetti from Density Design all made helpful suggestions on the visualisations presented. I have enjoyed more casual but no less profound chats with past and present members of CSISP at Goldsmiths: Michael Guggenheim, Joe Deville, Martin Savransky, Anna-Maria Teohari-Herman, Jess Perriam, Sveta Milyaeva, Vera Ehrenstein, Manuel Tironi, Andreas Birikbak, Irina Papazou and especially my excellent upgrade examiners Mike Michael and Alex Wilkie and office-mate Laurie Waller. I am also indebted to Nick Couldry, Vic Seidler, Anna Skarpelis and everyone at the NYLON reading group for helping me stay connected to my qualitative, sociological roots; Don Slater for setting me down my current path; Liz Moor for being so generous with her support and advice and Les Back for his passion for sociology. Also thanks go to my fellow travellers Miranda Iossofidis, Jim Kaufman, Anna Bull, Carolina Ramirez, Alice Corble, Felipe Palma, Francisco Calafate, Phil Thomas, Felipe Lagos, Jose Borges, Agata Pacho, Emily Nicholls, Tom Turnbull and Joe Shaw. Special thanks go to Katherine Blanks who reminded me that dyslexia is both a curse and a strength and last but not least, Lilith Whittles who pitched in with some technical fixes and very necessary proofreading; her support and the support of other wonderful friends is incalculable. This thesis is dedicated to my parents Michael and Lillian. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis considers the role of online platforms (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in digital social research from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective and proposes new conceptual, methodological and visual tactics, drawing on a series of empirical case studies concerning controversies over nuclear power. Recent work in STS seeks to map science controversies (GM foods, nanotechnology, climate change, etc. Venturini 2010) using digital tools, which repurpose online platforms for social research (Rogers 2009). Yet these platforms not only provide data about controversies, they may also intervene in them as well. I propose that this requires studying them ‘in action’, drawing on the techniques of controversy analysis (Latour 1987) and actor-network theory (ANT). However, this research presents several challenges. How to delineate a study when controversies transcend particular platforms? How to define what is relevant when these platforms have their own relevance-defining metrics? How to track information flows within or between platforms? The central argument of this thesis is that while researchers should capitalise on the affordances of these platforms, they must diverge from them as well. Theoretically, this means maintaining a tension between studying controversies and studying the platforms themselves. Methodologically this means decoupling methods from platform data structures: scraping less obvious data, juxtaposing quantitative and qualitative traces and presenting data in novel ways. Over three case studies, I will develop a series of mapping techniques for analysing controversies which qualify the quantitative and make the less calculable more calculable, revealing imbalances in the articulation and dissemination of controversies online which would remain hidden to platform- specific or qualitative approaches on their own. These exploratory techniques, which draw on work in the sociology of scientific representations (Woolgar and Lynch 1992), have implications for debates about big data, digital sociology, media studies and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods. 4 LIST OF FIGURES Please note that detailed technical information and settings for each visualisation are provided in the Technical Appendix at the end. Since all of the original visualisations are presented as exploratory, working documents, rather than finished pieces for communicating findings, they have been made available, via a shared Dropbox folder, for consultation as zoomable and searchable PDFs. These can be viewed through the Dropbox interface but for best results, download and use Acrobat Reader or open with Google Chrome or Firefox (which have PDF plugins). In Acrobat, zoom controls are at the top, in Chrome/Firefox, hover mouse over bottom right corner for zoom controls or ‘pinch’ on a tablet or phone. Use Ctrl-F to search for particular text. Please note that some files are very large and make take some time to load. Files are available in this folder: https://goo.gl/8J8Vdq, which should have been shared with you previously, and shortened links can be found in the text. FIGURES 1. LIKE NETWORK: https://goo.gl/kZ8AWj .................................................................................. 9 2. ISSUE NETWORK: https://goo.gl/FvRqIx ............................................................................... 73 3. EDIT COUNT VS SIZE: http://goo.gl/FHS6w3 ...................................................................... 107 4. FUKUSHIMA DISASTER REFERENCES FIRST WEEK: http://goo.gl/f0E1Ar ........................ 114 5. FUKUSHIMA POWER PLANT REFERENCES FIRST WEEK: http://goo.gl/iFSXC6 ................ 114 6. FUKUSHIMA DISASTER REFERENCES FIRST YEAR: http://goo.gl/zJNsp2 ......................... 117 7. RISEUP WORD-POST NETWORK: http://goo.gl/N36JSA .................................................... 142 8. RISEUP USERS-POST NETWORK: http://goo.gl/Zg0ILZ ....................................................... 143 9. STOP NEW NUCLEAR USER-POST NETWORK: http://goo.gl/li7EQP ................................ 147 10. STOP NEW NUCLEAR WORD-POST NETWORK: http://goo.gl/uALalV ........................... 148 11. STOP NEW NUCLEAR TRI-PARTITE: http://goo.gl/qTMIH8 .............................................. 160 12. STOP HINKLEY TRI-PARTITE: http://goo.gl/Jv5dCP .......................................................... 163 13. EDF TRI-PARTITE: http://goo.gl/35zij2 .............................................................................. 168 14. URL FREQUENCIES: http://goo.gl/ZVqm7O ...................................................................... 193 15. URL RIBBON GRAPHS: http://goo.gl/uqmJcj ..................................................................... 194 16. URL SEQUENCER – TREEHUGGER: http://goo.gl/kJelcX .................................................. 207 17. URL SEQUENCER – BBC STRIKE PRICE: http://goo.gl/mPke8E ........................................ 210 18. URL SEQUENCER – TWITTER STORM: http://goo.gl/05hV9G .......................................... 212 5 IMAGES 1. UPSTEAM / DOWNSTEAM .................................................................................................... 92 2. RADIATION MONITORS ...................................................................................................... 122 3. STOP HINKLEY PAGE ........................................................................................................... 133 4. RISEUP LISTS ........................................................................................................................ 139 5. DISCOURSE DIAGRAMS ...................................................................................................... 140 6. STOP NEW NUCLEAR FACEBOOK PAGE ........................................................................... 145 7. BALLOON PROTEST ............................................................................................................ 154 8. TWEETS ................................................................................................................................ 155 9. STOP HINKLEY FACEBOOK PAGE ...................................................................................... 162 10. EDF FACEBOOK PAGE ...................................................................................................... 167 11. MANUALLY CODED TWEETS ............................................................................................ 190 12. AUTOMATICALLY CODED TWEETS .................................................................................