Compare methods

	Digital Methods	Controversy Mapping
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	2010
Originator	Richard Rogers, Amsterdam Digital Methods Initiative	Bruno Latour (Sciences Po médialab); codified by Tommaso Venturini
Type	Empirical research approach for online data	Qualitative descriptive method and pedagogy
Seminal source	Rogers, R. (2013). Digital Methods. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262018838	Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258-273.
Aliases	Follow the medium, Natively digital research, Web epistemology methods	Cartography of controversies, Mapping scientific controversies, Controversy analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Digital methods is an empirical research approach, developed by Richard Rogers and the Amsterdam Digital Methods Initiative, that takes the methods of online platforms and devices—the link, the like, the hashtag, the search engine ranking—and repurposes them for social and cultural research. Its guiding maxim is to 'follow the medium': rather than importing offline methods like the survey onto the web, the analyst learns what the medium already counts, ranks, and recommends, and turns those native operations into research instruments.	Controversy mapping is a descriptive method for exploring and representing socio-technical disputes while they are still open and unsettled, before they harden into accepted facts or stable technologies. Developed as a teaching practice by Bruno Latour and codified by Tommaso Venturini at the Sciences Po médialab, it asks the analyst to dive into the heat of a debate, follow the actors and their arguments without prematurely taking sides, and render the resulting complexity legible through maps and visualisations. It treats controversy not as a pathology to be resolved but as the privileged moment in which the social and the technical are visibly being assembled.