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Noortje Marres

University of Warwick, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Faculty Member

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My work investigates various intersections between technology, environment, knowledge, and the public. I have a background in the social studies of science and technology, and my recent work is mainly concerned with the role of devices, environments and things in the enactment of participation (in public life, innovation, research, change). I take a special interest in digital forms of social research, with a focus on the development of methods and tools of controversy analysis and issue mapping. Finally, I have done work that brings together science and technology studies with political theory: I have written about issues of democracy in technological societies, and (neo-)pragmatist contributions to our understanding of it, through concepts of material participation and public experiments.

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Carolin Gerlitz

University of Siegen

Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II"

Alessandro Caliandro

Middlesex University

University of Helsinki

Esther Weltevrede

University of Amsterdam

Utrecht University

Anthony McCosker

Swinburne University of Technology

University of Amsterdam

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Books by Noortje Marres

The Labour of Interpretation

In: Nervous Systems: The Quantified Life and the Social Question. A Franke, S Hankey and M Tuszyn... more

Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics

What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh pers... more What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technology and settings in public involvement. It makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the role of things in democracy, but it also offers empirical analyses of contemporary devices of participation, such as smart meters, demonstrational eco-homes and sustainable living gadgets. Through case studies of mundane technologies of environmental engagement, this book then develops a set of concepts and methods for the social and political analysis of specifically material forms of participation. Material Participation explores the next steps to be taken in social studies of participation, technology and the environment, focusing our empirical, critical and creative attention squarely on the materials and devices of the public.

Papers by Noortje Marres

7. Experiments in Participation

by Noortje Marres, Javier Lezaun, and Manuel Tironi

This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension ... more This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension of public participation in contemporary societies. This work moves beyond the original focus of STS on the role of experimentation in the sciences to consider the proliferation of experimental formats in the arts, social movements, economic organization, and public life. The chapter outlines several strands of scholarship that, through the study of experiments, have developed a materialist, situational and performative understanding of the making of publics in technological societies. At the heart of this scholarship lies a formative ambiguity: the fact that experiments in participation operate as both an object of inquiry and a device that actors including researchers themselves can deploy for the creation of new collectives. After reviewing how a focus on experimental situations was instrumental to the emergence of STS as a distinctive mode of inquiry, the chapter elaborates three recent themes from the literature: object-centered engagement, inventive methods, and prototyping. The chapter concludes by arguing that experiments in participation represent a crucial nexus of theory and practice in contemporary science, technology and society, one that allows the field to expand its repertoire of political tools and participate in wider experimental cultures.

On the experimentalization of sociality in digital environments: detecting sociality with social media

by Noortje Marres and Carolin Gerlitz

Mapping Controversies with Social Media: The Case for Symmetry

by David Moats and Noortje Marres

This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approa... more This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We propose that this approach can help to address an important methodological problem in social media research, namely, the tension between social media as resource for social research and as an empirical object in its own right. Initially developed for analyzing interactions between science, technology, and society, controversy analysis has in recent decades been implemented digitally to study public debates and issues dynamics online. A key feature of controversy analysis as a digital method, we argue, is that it enables a symmetrical approach to the study of mediatechnological dynamics and issue dynamics. It allows us to pay equal attention to the ways in which a digital platform like Twitter mediates public issues, and to how controversies mediate "social media" as an object of public attention. To sketch the contours of such a symmetrical approach, the article discusses examples from a recent social media research project in which we mapped issues of "privacy" and "surveillance" in the wake of the National Security Agency (NSA) data leak by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Through a discussion of social media research practice, we then outline a symmetrical approach to analyzing controversy with social media. We conclude that the digital implementation of such an approach requires further exchanges between social media researchers and controversy analysts.

Notes on Objectual Valuation

Making Things Valuable

This chapter draws on the notion of ‘objectual’ practice to investigate a distinctive register o... more This chapter draws on the notion of ‘objectual’ practice to investigate a distinctive register of valuation that is becoming increasingly prominent in today’s informational economies. The authors introduce an expansive, ‘ontological’ understanding of objectual valuation and elaborate this understanding through empirical examples drawn from branding, digital analytics, and environmental art. Each of these fields implements empirical methods, devices, and arrangements that deploy dynamics of objectual valuation. They stand out for their investment in the empirical detection of ‘happening relations’ in ways that do not require the attribution of effects to either subjects or objects, individuals or environments. The authors discuss the capacities of these types of devices for inter-articulation, the creation of opportunities for valuation by bringing different fields into relation. However, none of these devices constitute objectual valuation as a process of socialization, which the authors propose is the critical object of investigation and elaboration in this area.

Marres & Lezaun _ Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

by Javier Lezaun and Noortje Marres

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of ... more This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method

Science, Technology and Human Values

This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method, i... more This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method, in science and technology studies (STS) and beyond, and outlines a distinctive approach to addressing a key challenge: the problem of digital bias. Digital settings like the Web exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy, and this risks to undermine the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The paper begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method: demarcationist, discursive and empiricist. While each of these frameworks has been adopted in STS, I argue that the last one offers the best opportunities to address the problem of digital bias. It allows us to further develop an STS-informed approach to controversy analysis, and to digitally implement its proposal to “move beyond impartiality” in the social study of knowledge and technology. To clarify how, I distinguish between two opposing solutions to the problem of digital bias in controversy analysis: a precautionary approach that seeks to render controversy independent from digital platforms, and an affirmative approach, which deploys specifically digital formats such as hyperlinks and hashtags to map controversies with media technologies. Endorsing the latter approach, I argue that it needs to be developed further in order to secure the substantive focus of digital controversy analysis. We must broaden the scope of digital controversy analysis and examine not just controversies, but a broader range of issue formations, including public relations campaigns and activist mobilizations. I explore the practical implementation of this approach to issue mapping online through a discussion of a case study, in which we analyzed issues of Internet governance with the social media platform Twitter.

Performing environmental change: The politics of social science methods

by Kristin Asdal and Noortje Marres

Interface Methods: Renegotiating relations between Sociology, STS and digital research

by Noortje Marres and Carolin Gerlitz

CSISP Working paper No. 3

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research ca... more This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called “interface methods.” We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasised the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and Sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research - ‘interface methods’ - and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways: first, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co-occurrence analysis. The second half of the paper presents a digital pilot study in which we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualise ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the critical and creative adaptation and modification of this method through its experimental implementation. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its mal-adjustment to the social methods that are prevalent in the medium.

Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

by Noortje Marres and Esther Weltevrede

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper see... more What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).

The Experiment in Living

This article engages with debates about widening participation in social research by examining a ... more This article engages with debates about widening participation in social research by examining a specific form of public action and knowledge, namely experiments in sustainable living. I propose that these experiments may be approached as forms of social research, and as such offer special opportunities for social research to insert itself into wider societal research arrangements. The article develops the notion of the multifarious instrument which highlights that genres of public action may be put to divergent purposes which may not always be clearly distinguished. I argue that this turns living experiments into critical sites of research, where sociologists may confront and challenge prevailing narrow formattings of the purpose of everyday experiments. I explore this claim further through two case studies: an analysis of sustainable living blogs, and an artistic experiment called Spiral Drawing Sunrise.

Why political ontology must be experimentalized: on the ecoshowhome as a participation device

Social Studies of Science, Jun 2013

This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy b... more This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in STS has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has been assumed to operate on a different level from that of politics and democracy understood as institutional and public forms. I distinguish between three different understandings of political ontology: theoretical, empirical and experimental. Each of these implies a different approach to the problem that non-humans pose for democracy. Theoretical ontology proposes to solve it by conceptual means, while empirical ontology renders it manageable by assuming a problematic analytic separation between constituting and constituted ontology. This paper makes the case for the third approach, experimental ontology, by analysing an empirical site, that of the ecoshowhome. In this setting, material entities are deliberately invested with moral and political capacities. As such, ecoshowhomes help to clarify two main features of experimental political ontology: 1) ontological work is here not so much relocated from theory to empirical practice, but distributed among actors and entities involved in it, and 2) normative variability does not just pertain to the enactment of things, but can be conceived of as internal to political objects. From these two features of experimental ontology something follows for democracy as an ontological problem. This problem does not dissolve in empirical settings, but these settings make possible its articulation by experimental means.

Issues spark a public into being. A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate (2005)

Making things public: atmospheres of democracy, Jan 1, 2005

The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Reconnecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things

This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through an empirical example, ... more This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through an empirical example, teateapots equipped to facilitate environmental awareness and action. It distinguishes between two different forms of object politics: the politics of scripted objects and the politics of augmented objects. Where the former object is political by virtue of the contraints it places on subjects, the latter's politics derive from the object's capacity to resonate with issues. Here the range of issues the object is capable to conjure up - its issuefication - is the principal index of its politicization. The latter form of object politics can be recognized in contemporary objects that are equipped with digital technologies, such as environmental teapots. Iit can also be traced back to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the object-centred theory of morality and politics proposed by him. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the empirical methods that may be deployed to detect and analyse the politics of augmented objects, in particular textual and visual analysis.

On some uses and abuses of topology in the social analysis of technology (Or the problem with smart meters)

Theory, Culture, Society, Oct 2012

This article examines different ways in which topological ideas can be used to analyse technology... more This article examines different ways in which topological ideas can be used to analyse technology in social terms, arguing that we must become more discerning and demanding as to the limits and possibilities of topological analysis than used to be necessary. Topological framings of technology and society are increasingly widespread, and in this context, it becomes necessary to consider topology not just as a theory to be adopted, but equally as a device that is deployed in social life in a variety of ways. Digital technologies require special attention in this regard: on the one hand, these technologies have made it possible for a topological imagination of technology and society to become more widely adopted; on the other hand, they have also enabled a weak form of topological imagination to proliferate, one that leaves in place old, deterministic ideas about technology as a principal driver of social change. Turning to an empirical case, that of smart electricity metering, the article investigates how topological approaches enable both limited and rigorous ‘expansions of the frame’ on technology. In some cases, topology is used to imagine technology as a dynamic, heterogeneous arrangement, but ‘the primacy of
technology’ is maintained. In other cases a topological approach is used to bring into view much more complex relations between technological and societal change. The article ends with an exploration of the topological devices that are today deployed to render relations between technological and social change more
complexly, such as the online visualisation tool of tag clouding. I propose that such a topological device enables an empirical mode of critique: here, topology does not just help to make the point of the mutual entanglement of the social and the technical, but helps to dramatize the contingent, dynamic and non-coherent unfolding of issues.

The environmental rendering of controversy: Who is afraid of the green cloud?

This article presents an analysis of environmental controversy based on documents collected by th... more

The costs of public involvement: everyday devices of carbon accounting and the materialization of participation (2011)

This paper contributes to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation ... more This paper contributes to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to ‘materialise’ public participation. It argues that the materialisation of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not just refer to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be ‘made easy’ (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of ‘co-articulation’ (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to ‘co-articulate’ participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, spaces of participation organised with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of ‘multi-valent’ action. Different carbon accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the ‘materialisation’ of environmental participation. In some cases, materialisation entails the minimisation of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.

The redistribution of methods: on intervention in digital social research, broadly conceived

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social researc... more This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the re-distribution of methods. Not only can this concept help to clarify these implications, it can inform our engagement with the normative and analytic promises and problems that the digitization of social life opens up for social research. I argue that in the context of digitization social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods: search engines, blogs, information visualisation tools, and so on, play a notable part in the enactment of methods on the Web. The paper explores this phenomenon in relation to online network and textual analysis, and argues that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with it, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the re-distribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a re-distributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, namely co-citation analysis and co-word analysis, and I argue that, as such, they involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm. Both methods were developed in the 1970s and 1980s as a critique of then dominant methods of citation analysis. Transposing these methods online, they offer a way for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, in re-distributions of social methods that are currently on-going in digital media.

Testing Powers of Engagement (2009)

European Journal of Social Theory, Jan 1, 2009

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement.... more This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of 'being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement.

The Labour of Interpretation

In: Nervous Systems: The Quantified Life and the Social Question. A Franke, S Hankey and M Tuszyn... more

Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics

What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh pers... more What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technology and settings in public involvement. It makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the role of things in democracy, but it also offers empirical analyses of contemporary devices of participation, such as smart meters, demonstrational eco-homes and sustainable living gadgets. Through case studies of mundane technologies of environmental engagement, this book then develops a set of concepts and methods for the social and political analysis of specifically material forms of participation. Material Participation explores the next steps to be taken in social studies of participation, technology and the environment, focusing our empirical, critical and creative attention squarely on the materials and devices of the public.

7. Experiments in Participation

by Noortje Marres, Javier Lezaun, and Manuel Tironi

This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension ... more This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension of public participation in contemporary societies. This work moves beyond the original focus of STS on the role of experimentation in the sciences to consider the proliferation of experimental formats in the arts, social movements, economic organization, and public life. The chapter outlines several strands of scholarship that, through the study of experiments, have developed a materialist, situational and performative understanding of the making of publics in technological societies. At the heart of this scholarship lies a formative ambiguity: the fact that experiments in participation operate as both an object of inquiry and a device that actors including researchers themselves can deploy for the creation of new collectives. After reviewing how a focus on experimental situations was instrumental to the emergence of STS as a distinctive mode of inquiry, the chapter elaborates three recent themes from the literature: object-centered engagement, inventive methods, and prototyping. The chapter concludes by arguing that experiments in participation represent a crucial nexus of theory and practice in contemporary science, technology and society, one that allows the field to expand its repertoire of political tools and participate in wider experimental cultures.

On the experimentalization of sociality in digital environments: detecting sociality with social media

by Noortje Marres and Carolin Gerlitz

Mapping Controversies with Social Media: The Case for Symmetry

by David Moats and Noortje Marres

This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approa... more This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We propose that this approach can help to address an important methodological problem in social media research, namely, the tension between social media as resource for social research and as an empirical object in its own right. Initially developed for analyzing interactions between science, technology, and society, controversy analysis has in recent decades been implemented digitally to study public debates and issues dynamics online. A key feature of controversy analysis as a digital method, we argue, is that it enables a symmetrical approach to the study of mediatechnological dynamics and issue dynamics. It allows us to pay equal attention to the ways in which a digital platform like Twitter mediates public issues, and to how controversies mediate "social media" as an object of public attention. To sketch the contours of such a symmetrical approach, the article discusses examples from a recent social media research project in which we mapped issues of "privacy" and "surveillance" in the wake of the National Security Agency (NSA) data leak by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Through a discussion of social media research practice, we then outline a symmetrical approach to analyzing controversy with social media. We conclude that the digital implementation of such an approach requires further exchanges between social media researchers and controversy analysts.

Notes on Objectual Valuation

Making Things Valuable

This chapter draws on the notion of ‘objectual’ practice to investigate a distinctive register o... more This chapter draws on the notion of ‘objectual’ practice to investigate a distinctive register of valuation that is becoming increasingly prominent in today’s informational economies. The authors introduce an expansive, ‘ontological’ understanding of objectual valuation and elaborate this understanding through empirical examples drawn from branding, digital analytics, and environmental art. Each of these fields implements empirical methods, devices, and arrangements that deploy dynamics of objectual valuation. They stand out for their investment in the empirical detection of ‘happening relations’ in ways that do not require the attribution of effects to either subjects or objects, individuals or environments. The authors discuss the capacities of these types of devices for inter-articulation, the creation of opportunities for valuation by bringing different fields into relation. However, none of these devices constitute objectual valuation as a process of socialization, which the authors propose is the critical object of investigation and elaboration in this area.

Marres & Lezaun _ Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

by Javier Lezaun and Noortje Marres

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of ... more This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method

Science, Technology and Human Values

This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method, i... more This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method, in science and technology studies (STS) and beyond, and outlines a distinctive approach to addressing a key challenge: the problem of digital bias. Digital settings like the Web exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy, and this risks to undermine the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The paper begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method: demarcationist, discursive and empiricist. While each of these frameworks has been adopted in STS, I argue that the last one offers the best opportunities to address the problem of digital bias. It allows us to further develop an STS-informed approach to controversy analysis, and to digitally implement its proposal to “move beyond impartiality” in the social study of knowledge and technology. To clarify how, I distinguish between two opposing solutions to the problem of digital bias in controversy analysis: a precautionary approach that seeks to render controversy independent from digital platforms, and an affirmative approach, which deploys specifically digital formats such as hyperlinks and hashtags to map controversies with media technologies. Endorsing the latter approach, I argue that it needs to be developed further in order to secure the substantive focus of digital controversy analysis. We must broaden the scope of digital controversy analysis and examine not just controversies, but a broader range of issue formations, including public relations campaigns and activist mobilizations. I explore the practical implementation of this approach to issue mapping online through a discussion of a case study, in which we analyzed issues of Internet governance with the social media platform Twitter.

Performing environmental change: The politics of social science methods

by Kristin Asdal and Noortje Marres

Interface Methods: Renegotiating relations between Sociology, STS and digital research

by Noortje Marres and Carolin Gerlitz

CSISP Working paper No. 3

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research ca... more This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called “interface methods.” We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasised the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and Sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research - ‘interface methods’ - and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways: first, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co-occurrence analysis. The second half of the paper presents a digital pilot study in which we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualise ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the critical and creative adaptation and modification of this method through its experimental implementation. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its mal-adjustment to the social methods that are prevalent in the medium.

Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

by Noortje Marres and Esther Weltevrede

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper see... more What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).

The Experiment in Living

This article engages with debates about widening participation in social research by examining a ... more This article engages with debates about widening participation in social research by examining a specific form of public action and knowledge, namely experiments in sustainable living. I propose that these experiments may be approached as forms of social research, and as such offer special opportunities for social research to insert itself into wider societal research arrangements. The article develops the notion of the multifarious instrument which highlights that genres of public action may be put to divergent purposes which may not always be clearly distinguished. I argue that this turns living experiments into critical sites of research, where sociologists may confront and challenge prevailing narrow formattings of the purpose of everyday experiments. I explore this claim further through two case studies: an analysis of sustainable living blogs, and an artistic experiment called Spiral Drawing Sunrise.

Why political ontology must be experimentalized: on the ecoshowhome as a participation device

Social Studies of Science, Jun 2013

This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy b... more This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in STS has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has been assumed to operate on a different level from that of politics and democracy understood as institutional and public forms. I distinguish between three different understandings of political ontology: theoretical, empirical and experimental. Each of these implies a different approach to the problem that non-humans pose for democracy. Theoretical ontology proposes to solve it by conceptual means, while empirical ontology renders it manageable by assuming a problematic analytic separation between constituting and constituted ontology. This paper makes the case for the third approach, experimental ontology, by analysing an empirical site, that of the ecoshowhome. In this setting, material entities are deliberately invested with moral and political capacities. As such, ecoshowhomes help to clarify two main features of experimental political ontology: 1) ontological work is here not so much relocated from theory to empirical practice, but distributed among actors and entities involved in it, and 2) normative variability does not just pertain to the enactment of things, but can be conceived of as internal to political objects. From these two features of experimental ontology something follows for democracy as an ontological problem. This problem does not dissolve in empirical settings, but these settings make possible its articulation by experimental means.

Issues spark a public into being. A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate (2005)

Making things public: atmospheres of democracy, Jan 1, 2005

The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Reconnecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things

This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through an empirical example, ... more This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through an empirical example, teateapots equipped to facilitate environmental awareness and action. It distinguishes between two different forms of object politics: the politics of scripted objects and the politics of augmented objects. Where the former object is political by virtue of the contraints it places on subjects, the latter's politics derive from the object's capacity to resonate with issues. Here the range of issues the object is capable to conjure up - its issuefication - is the principal index of its politicization. The latter form of object politics can be recognized in contemporary objects that are equipped with digital technologies, such as environmental teapots. Iit can also be traced back to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the object-centred theory of morality and politics proposed by him. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the empirical methods that may be deployed to detect and analyse the politics of augmented objects, in particular textual and visual analysis.

On some uses and abuses of topology in the social analysis of technology (Or the problem with smart meters)

Theory, Culture, Society, Oct 2012

This article examines different ways in which topological ideas can be used to analyse technology... more This article examines different ways in which topological ideas can be used to analyse technology in social terms, arguing that we must become more discerning and demanding as to the limits and possibilities of topological analysis than used to be necessary. Topological framings of technology and society are increasingly widespread, and in this context, it becomes necessary to consider topology not just as a theory to be adopted, but equally as a device that is deployed in social life in a variety of ways. Digital technologies require special attention in this regard: on the one hand, these technologies have made it possible for a topological imagination of technology and society to become more widely adopted; on the other hand, they have also enabled a weak form of topological imagination to proliferate, one that leaves in place old, deterministic ideas about technology as a principal driver of social change. Turning to an empirical case, that of smart electricity metering, the article investigates how topological approaches enable both limited and rigorous ‘expansions of the frame’ on technology. In some cases, topology is used to imagine technology as a dynamic, heterogeneous arrangement, but ‘the primacy of
technology’ is maintained. In other cases a topological approach is used to bring into view much more complex relations between technological and societal change. The article ends with an exploration of the topological devices that are today deployed to render relations between technological and social change more
complexly, such as the online visualisation tool of tag clouding. I propose that such a topological device enables an empirical mode of critique: here, topology does not just help to make the point of the mutual entanglement of the social and the technical, but helps to dramatize the contingent, dynamic and non-coherent unfolding of issues.

The environmental rendering of controversy: Who is afraid of the green cloud?

This article presents an analysis of environmental controversy based on documents collected by th... more

The costs of public involvement: everyday devices of carbon accounting and the materialization of participation (2011)

This paper contributes to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation ... more This paper contributes to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to ‘materialise’ public participation. It argues that the materialisation of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not just refer to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be ‘made easy’ (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of ‘co-articulation’ (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to ‘co-articulate’ participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, spaces of participation organised with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of ‘multi-valent’ action. Different carbon accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the ‘materialisation’ of environmental participation. In some cases, materialisation entails the minimisation of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.

The redistribution of methods: on intervention in digital social research, broadly conceived

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social researc... more This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the re-distribution of methods. Not only can this concept help to clarify these implications, it can inform our engagement with the normative and analytic promises and problems that the digitization of social life opens up for social research. I argue that in the context of digitization social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods: search engines, blogs, information visualisation tools, and so on, play a notable part in the enactment of methods on the Web. The paper explores this phenomenon in relation to online network and textual analysis, and argues that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with it, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the re-distribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a re-distributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, namely co-citation analysis and co-word analysis, and I argue that, as such, they involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm. Both methods were developed in the 1970s and 1980s as a critique of then dominant methods of citation analysis. Transposing these methods online, they offer a way for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, in re-distributions of social methods that are currently on-going in digital media.

Testing Powers of Engagement (2009)

European Journal of Social Theory, Jan 1, 2009

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement.... more This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of 'being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement.

Experimental failure: Notes on the limits of the performativity of markets (with L McGoey)

working paper, Oct 2012

In a context of proliferating crises, from the environment to the economy, the politics and epist... more In a context of proliferating crises, from the environment to the economy, the politics and epistemology of “failure” – institutional, human, technological, environmental – is acquiring fresh relevance. Recent analyses in social studies of science and technology, as well as in political and economic sociology, have developed performative perspectives on this issue, and much of this work has focused on ‘market experiments.’ In this article, we suggest that these performative perspectives on market experiments suffer from some of the same shortcomings as market experiments themselves: they are biased towards success, and limited in their ability to acknowledge failure. Here, we seek to address this shortcoming by developing a three-fold typology. Adopting an expansive notion of experiments in political economy, we argue that an adequate analysis requires further interrogation of the multifaceted nature of experimental failure, in particular of its alternatively restrictive and generative aspects. In order to explore the diverse, overlapping, and often paradoxical effects of experimental failures – such as the way that failures can both create and diminish opportunities to challenge the authority of existent political and economic frameworks – we distinguish three types of failure: 1) entropic failure; 2) generative failure; and 3) performative failure.

Recipe for Tracing the Fate of Issues and their Publics on the Web (2005)

Making things public: …, Jan 1, 2005

T. Zuiderent-Jerak (2015) Situated Intervention

by Jessica Mesman, Brit Ross Winthereik, and Noortje Marres

Book review: Zuiderent-Jerak Teun (2015) Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Healt... more