Platforms for Issue Mapping: Demonstrating the Relevance for Participatory Social Research

Issue mapping offers a set of tools, methods, and techniques for the analysis of current affairs on the Web. An active research community is currently emerging around this approach in the UK as well as internationally, as three platforms for issue mapping have come online in recent years: Issuecrawler, demoscience.org and Mapping Controversies. These web-based platforms make available a range of applications and guidelines for the online location, analysis and visualisation of issues. They offer a distinctive approach to digital social research insofar as they enable forms of 'real-time' research: the online analysis of dynamic content. Issue mapping also entails a participatory approach to social research, as it combines computing techniques with social methods and the design of visual outputs. Issue mapping platforms are currently used in both academic research in leading social science departments as well as by organisations active in issue advocacy, design research and social technology. This project seeks to develop the contribution of issue mapping to digital social research, by enabling exchange among these diverse users and developers of issue mapping. More specifically, its aim is to identify, facilitate and communicate the contribution of issue analysis to the development of participatory and real-time methods of digital social research.

In order to identify, facilitate and elaborate the use of issue mapping platforms in digital social research, this project will combine two formats: a) the hosting of workshops that bring together existing and future users and developers of issue mapping, and b) the development of instructional publications on the aims, methods and tactics of issue mapping for social research audiences, broadly conceived. Several workshops and methods courses around online issue mapping have been organised in the UK in recent years, among others at the University of Oxford and Lancaster. These events have mostly concentrated on the transfer of issue mapping skills to researchers and post-graduate students. In the proposed project, the workshop format will be used to identify methodologies of issue mapping in social research in a bottom-up way. Specifically, the workshops will produce issue mappings that exemplify its contribution to participatory social research in three key respects: the calibration of research needs, the re-distribution of analytical competencies in issue mapping, and the relevance of a range of visualisation tactics.

Two workshops will bring together users and developers of issue mapping with four different competency profiles: social research, creative computing, issue advocacy, and visual design. The participation of representatives of each of these four competency groupings is crucial to explicate and elaborate the contribution of issue mapping to methodological innovation in digital social research. During the workshops small groupings will explore specific related questions in issue mapping projects: what research needs does and can issue mapping fulfil? how does issue mapping re-distribute analytical competencies among devices, analysts and objects of social analysis? What visualisation tactics are relevant and effective for issue mapping? The groups will develop case studies that will be able to serve as an introduction to digital methods of issue mapping for social researchers. The workshops will produce visual outputs with demonstrational value. as these outputs will form the basis for the creation of two publications: an report for organisational users of issue mapping, and an instructional publication on issue mapping as a digital social research method, both to be developed in the last stage of this demonstrator project.

Several transnational NGOs, active on the interface between digital informational technologies and issue advocacy have been involved in the development of issue mapping: Issue Crawler was initially funded by Open Society Foundation, Oneworld International (both based in the UK); The World Wildlife Fund and the Association for Progressive Communications have commissioned case studies; the Young Foundation serves as a partner in a current EU-funded project with the Amsterdam and Paris teams. In a previously funded international workshop series, The Social Life of Issues, Richard Rogers and the PI facilitated the development of issue mapping case studies in teams bringing together academic social researchers with transnational issue advocacy organisations (eg the Soros Foundations, Transparency International).

The diversity of organisations involved in issue mapping, in and of itself, can be taken as an indication of the increased relevance of ICT-based social research in the NGO sector. This organisational interest in social research has more recently been enhanced because of the rise of the social web and the perceived opportunities for making it useful for advocacy and public engagement in specific issue areas. However, this interest in social research has as yet not translated in closer connections with academic social science and NGOs in this sector: links are relatively sparse between on the one hand, UK social science departments involved in online controversy analysis, and on the other hand, aforementioned UK-based NGOs that played an important role in its development. For this reason, a key objective of this demonstrator project in terms of impact is to enable exchange among researchers and practitioners in the different relevant sectors in which platform users and developers are located.

This demonstrator project is beneficial to these organisations in two ways. Firstly, the project seeks to facilitate the further uptake of issue mapping by relevant organisations by involving them as key participants in its development. This project explicitly seeks to enrol representatives of key organisational competencies - design research, issue advocacy, social technology - in the development of academically excellent research. This also creates opportunities for impact, as the close involvement of organisational participants in research facilitates the creative uptake of research tools, techniques and practices in organisational practice. The project will include among its workshop participants both existing organisational users (Tactical Technology Collective, Oneworld International) as well as new ones (Demos; the design agency STBY). In doing so, this demonstrator project will benefit from the input of organisation-specific competencies in the development of social research. It is also a way of ensuring that organisational research needs are taken into consideration early on in the project. In the longer term, such an approach should enable the consolidation of more participatory methods in social research and the building of organisational expertise into social research tools, techniques and methods.

A second way in which this project enables the wider impact of online issue mapping platforms, is by creating accessible publications that will provide an introduction to online issue mapping as a set of social research methods. These publications should both spread awareness of and strengthen commitment to issue mapping among professional users. They will be disseminated by a variety of means, through issue mapping platforms themselves, workshop participants, related publications and the project website. As an overall impact objective, the aim is to enable academic and professional social research to mutually challenge one another, and thereby, to facilitate more independent, rigorous and creative styles of social research to take hold.