CONFERENCEThe presentation will introduce Controversy Mapping as a methodological framework for studying how contested topics circulate across digital platforms. Rooted in Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory, the approach treats controversies as analytically privileged moments in democratic societies – situations in which it is possible to observe how knowledge is produced and how consensus is reached.
The presentation situates this framework within a broader account of web transformation: from Web 1.0 through the participatory Web 2.0 to the current era of platformisation, which has produced closed information ecosystems and platform-specific affordances that make cross-platform comparison methodologically challenging. URL links are proposed as one of the most valuable digital objects for cross-platform research, as they function comparably across platforms while carrying information about political alignment, source credibility, and community boundaries.
These arguments will be illustrated through two empirical cases from the Polish digital landscape: an analysis of an environmental controversy combining Wikipedia link analysis, scientific literature, and nearly 300,000 social media posts; and a large-scale study of 95 topics related to problematic information about science, comprising nearly one million posts. Together, these cases demonstrate how linking behaviour differs markedly between genuine controversies and disinformation – the latter being far more self-referential and rarely anchored to external sources.
The presentation will conclude by outlining five research designs for the WICE project, including cross-platform URL analysis, BERT-based narrative mapping, triangulation of interview data with social media content, long-term sentiment analysis across four countries, and tracking of political party narratives on migration over time.
Maria Eva Lompe recently obtained her PhD from the Doctoral School of Humanities, Theology and Art at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on internet studies, particularly controversy mapping using digital methods and the analysis of disinformation. She has contributed to several international research projects on new technologies and social media, and is co-author of a number of scholarly publications examining Russian disinformation in the Polish online sphere.
