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

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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.