Mapping a controversy of our time:

The AnthropoceneSimone Belli - School of Innovation, Yachay Tech

Opening Pandora’s box

Why controversies?

The word “controversy” refers to every bit of science and technology which is not yet stabilized. (Bruno Latour, 1987)

Opening Pandora’s box

• Where researchers are positioned respect to a controversy?

Not just 2 positions, but multiples and complex positions!

Crossing controversies (political, socio-technical, nature, etc.)

Just observe!!!

Opening Pandora’s box Just observe!!!

(Latour, 2014)1. you shall not restrain your observation to any single theory or methodology;

2. you shall observe from as many viewpoints as possible;

3. you shall listen to actors’ voices more than to your own presumptions.

A cartography

When controversies flare up the literature becomes technical!

“There are no definitions to learn; no premises to honor; no hypothesis to demonstrate; no procedure to follow; no correlations to establish. Researchers are not even asked to explain what they study, but only to observe a controversy and describe what they see.”

(Venturini, 2010:3)

An example of cartography (Latour, 1994)

Mapping a Scientific Controversy in YT

A

a question for meditation

geological era perspective

an ideaa shock about 2 temporalities

a narcissistic mood

a symptom of Pachamamanot a scientific term

not validated by geologists

not a real geological unit

a scientific possibility

a media event

“set the scene”

…

Where are you positioned?

Who is the villain and who is the hero in the piece?

Drawing a Research Landscape

1. Glossary

2. Documentation repository

3. Analysis of Scientific Literature

“Anthropocene”

ScopusWeb of Science

Bibliometrics mappingNetworks

Clusters grouping

SCOPUS WEB OF SCIENCE

RESULTS 1037 documents

785 documents

Documents by year

Anthropocene 47Holocene 27Geological Society Special Publication 16Quaternary Science Reviews 15Proceedings of the NAS of the USA 15Philosophical Transactions of the RS 12Nature 12Science 11

Documents by author

Documents by affiliation

Documents by country

Docu

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ts b

y ty

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Docu

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y su

bjec

t are

a

But where is the controversy?!?

Working with networks•Network and density of bibliographic coupling (van Eck, Walkman, 2009)

•Network of all publications•Network of the most cited authors•Network of the terms occurring in the publication

•Co-words analysis (Callon et al., 1986)•Clusters grouping in co-occurrence of terms analysis and density view (Guerrero et al., 2015)

•…

Bibl

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OSvi

ewer

Social Science

Environmental Science

Earth and Planetary Science

Agricultural and Biological Science

Density Visualisation

Density Visualisation

Density of the most cited and co-cited works

Citation Network of publications1861

2016

Network and density of co-authors

But we have just relations of authors and discipline. And the content?!?

Creating maps based on a text corpus (Callon, Law,

Rip, 1986)

• Title and Abstract

• Minimum number of occurrences of a term: 10

• Verify selected terms

Just look at controversy and tell what you see!

Time to open the debate

• Controversies are interested scientific landscapes

• Cartographies and digital tools help us to understand these

• Definitely A. is a huge contemporary controversy