Papers by Anders Kristian Munk
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
"Controversy Mapping" shows how we can use social research to bring controversies back ... more "Controversy Mapping" shows how we can use social research to bring controversies back to the surface of knowledge and public life, and how it can help to recover the power of controversy to transform what's possible. The book provides everything you need – the ideas, examples, and techniques – to start doing controversy analysis.” Noortje Marres, University of Warwick “Venturini and Munk have produced a significant book that traces the genealogy of controversy mapping back to its origins in actor-network theory to its incarnations in digital methods. Through a lucid and engaging narrative and series of visualizations, they provide a comprehensive ‘field guide’ to the major figures, theories, concepts, and methods that make up the practices of controversy mapping.” Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London As disputes concerning the environment, the economy, and pandemics occupy public debate, we need to learn to navigate matters of public concern when facts are in doubt and expertise is contested. "Controversy Mapping" is the first book to introduce readers to the observation and representation of contested issues on digital media. Drawing on actor-network theory and digital methods, Venturini and Munk outline the conceptual underpinnings and the many tools and techniques of controversy mapping. They review its history in science and technology studies, discuss its methodological potential, and unfold its political implications. Through a range of cases and examples, they demonstrate how to chart actors and issues using digital fieldwork and computational techniques. A preface by Richard Rogers and an interview with Bruno Latour are also included. A crucial field guide and hands-on companion for the digital age, "Controversy Mapping" is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as activists, journalists, citizens, and decision makers
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Science & Technology Studies, 2012
Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably John Law and Bruno... more Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably John Law and Bruno Latour) have crystallized a fundamental disagreement about the scope and purpose of intervention in actor-network theory or what we here choose to bracket as empirical philosophy. While the precept of agnostic description is taken as a given, the desired effects of such descriptions are highly debated: Is the goal to interfere with the singularity of the real through the enactment of multiple and possibly conflicting ontologies? Or is it (also) to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure? In this paper we think about this disagreement as a question of research strategy (a normative discord about the desirable outcome of an intervention) in order to assess its implications for research tactics (a descriptive accord about the practical crafting of an adequate account). A key point here is to challenge the impermeability of s...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Social Life of Climate Change Models, 2012
The issue of riverine flooding in the UK is closely tied up with computer simulations. Arguably, ... more The issue of riverine flooding in the UK is closely tied up with computer simulations. Arguably, these modelling practices are ripe with the anticipation of nature. They aspire to pre-empt it, hence expect it to be ‘out there’, and ultimately work through formalized distillations of it – hydrodynamic equations – which have their own anticipations and place their own demands on their modellers. Through the experience of a flood modelling apprenticeship I argue that the taking-place of such anticipations paradoxically relies on the birth of a hybrid, the model-modeller, and thus on a nature which is generative rather than anticipative and wholly freed from ontological confines.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Big Data & Society, 2022
According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explic... more According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural network to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same (poor) accuracy as the players (51%), b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where i...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
digitalSTS, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research Methodologies and Ethical Challenges in Digital Migration Studies, 2021
Reading across the contributions of this book, this comment argues for a “Caring for big data” in... more Reading across the contributions of this book, this comment argues for a “Caring for big data” in critical proximity with the tools and techniques of data scientific practices. Contrary to a critically distant position, caring for big data in critical proximity is to practice it differently. It raises the question of how tools for data harvest, analysis, and visualization should be designed if the task was taken on from inside digital migration studies.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Kulturstudier, 2013
In vogue: the new everyday of cultural analysis Based on two examples from user-driven innovati... more In vogue: the new everyday of cultural analysis Based on two examples from user-driven innovation projects, we discuss what it means to undertake cultural analysis when the task is to change practices of everyday life. Whether it is about new garbage bins or new bathrooms, the examples enable us to demonstrate how and why companies and public-sector institutions are increasingly inviting cultural analysts to contribute to their work. At the same time, the examples allow us to illustrate some of the difficulties that cultural analysts experience when they – in the name of change – begin to scrutinise and ‘stir up’ the practices of everyday life; for instance, by studying how citizens with disabilities handle garbage and personal hygiene. What happens, we ask, when cultural analysis is called upon to inform the ways in which such complex practices might change? Through our two examples, we show how the difficulty relates to balancing a desire for change with a respect for the durabl...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Choice Reviews Online, 2015
ABSTRACT Digitalization and computerization are now pervasive in science. This has deep consequen... more ABSTRACT Digitalization and computerization are now pervasive in science. This has deep consequences for our understanding of scientific knowledge and of the scientific process, and challenges longstanding assumptions and traditional frameworks of thinking of scientific knowledge. Digital media and computational processes challenge our conception of the way in which perception and cognition work in science, of the objectivity of science, and the nature of scientific objects. They bring about new relationships between science, art and other visual media, and new ways of practicing science and organizing scientific work, especially as new visual media are being adopted by science studies scholars in their own practice. This volume reflects on how scientists use images in the computerization age, and how digital technologies are affecting the study of science.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
2014 - Special Issue: European Ethnology Revisited, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
To appear as a chapter of the Digital STS Handbook (digitalsts.net) This paper discusses the diff... more To appear as a chapter of the Digital STS Handbook (digitalsts.net) This paper discusses the differences and affinities among three types of networks (namely Actor-Networks, Social Networks and Digital Networks) that are playing an increasingly important role in digital STS. In the last few decades, the notion of networks has slowly but steadily struck root across broad strands of STS research. It started with the advent of actor-network theory, which provided a convenient instrument to describe the construction work of socio-technical phenomena. Then came network analysis, and scholars who imported into STS the techniques of investigation and visualization developed in the tradition of social network analysis and scientometrics. Finally, with the increasing 'computerization' of STS, scholars turned their attention to digital networks as a way of tracing collective life. Many researchers have more or less explicitly tried to link these three movements in one coherent set of ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Anders Kristian Munk