the globe, encouraging a shift away from nuclear power, in many cases towards fossil fuels. Of course, fossil alternatives have significant disaster risks in their own right, but these risks were not made available for inquiry through the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe (though they were later brought into the debate by environmental activists). Controversies apply no “fairness” in the way they distribute scrutiny across claims and positions. They shed light on some collective phenomena but cast shadows on others.
Still, the problem of “not observing enough” tends to be secondary in controversy mapping. Imagine being a gold miner patiently sifting through the gravel of a mountain stream. At first you are not finding much, but at least you can set your own pace and control your workflow. This is the situation at the outset of most controversy mapping projects. Now imagine that every pebble in the river decides that it is going to help by jumping into your sieve. Buried under the avalanche, the mountain scenery loses most of its appeal. This is a caricature but an accurate one: controversies can be exasperating for the sheer quantity of arguments, documents, evidence, and questions that they impose on the cartographer. All controversy mapping projects therefore tend to go through their own form of “hype cycle” (see figure 10) (Fenn & Raskino, 2008). Cartographers are usually optimistic at the outset: their subject looks interesting; the simplest Web search provides tons of documents, interviews and position statements. But as the investigation proceeds, their optimism tends to fade: the more they inquire, the less they seem to make sense of the controversy. Things turn out to be far more intricate than expected. The most visible actors are not necessarily the most influential; new and unexpected characters sprout everywhere; the arguments are more subtle and charged with countless ifs and buts; simple ways of grasping the debate prove inapt, but sticking to the raw complexity produces very confusing maps. A long plateau of disillusionment must be crossed before things start to make sense again (and from there, it is still a long way to reach a satisfactory mapping).
Figure 10 The hype cycle of controversy mapping (created by the authors; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Acknowledging the overabundant nature of controversies leads directly to the question that haunts all controversy mappers: where to stop? This question is crucial and less trivial than it may appear (Strathern, 1996). Most controversies (and most social phenomena) do not have clear-cut boundaries. If you follow the web of collective actions, you will find no obvious points to stop. The social fabric is continuous and extends indefinitely from interference to interference. Knowing where to stop is always, at least in part, a subjective decision, as observed by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert:
Where we set the boundaries is an analytical and political matter … [it] depends on our own questions, and our own agendas. It also tells us that whatever the stories that we tell … these will only ever be partial. There can be no exhaustive analysis of devices. There is always more to be told, more and different, about the work that they do, and about what and how they assemble, distribute and operate upon, the social. So how do we decide where we want to set our boundaries? (Law & Ruppert, 2013 p. 233)
Yet, although continuous, the social fabric is not uniform. All actors and all actions are eventually connected, but some are in a more direct way than others. Controversies could be bounded by their spatial context (global warming is not the same in Siberia as it is on a low-lying island in the Pacific); the communities they touch (the discussions in the IPCC are not the same as in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change); the medium in which they take place (climate debate on Twitter is not the same as in the scientific literature), etc.
Consider temporal boundaries, for instance. Some controversies have a clear start date (e.g., by the publication of a contentious paper) and a clear end date (e.g., a Nobel prize acclamation), but most do not. A good example is the controversy around gravitational waves studied by Harry Collins, which has been revived every time a new measurement technique was introduced. In such a situation, cartographers can keep investigating, as Collins did in the book he published in 2004, retracing the more than four-decade quest for gravitational waves, but could also focus on one of the “episodes” of the dispute, as Collins did in his 1975 paper discussing the debates surrounding one specific experiment.
Where to stop really depends on your resources and interests and in this sense controversy mapping is not unlike traditional cartography. Geographical territories are generally defined by natural boundaries (the shore of the sea, a major river, a mountain chain, etc.) but such boundaries are always somewhat arbitrary (Fall, 2010). So where should the mapping stop? The default solution in modern geographical cartography is simply to stop where the paper finishes. The edges of the page or of the canvas become the limits of the map. This solution acknowledges openly the arbitrariness of the cartographer’s decisions and suggests that each map is nothing but a cut of a larger atlas.
The same holds for controversy mapping. You are free to choose where to end your analysis, but you have to assume the burden of proving that your choice has practical utility (no natural boundary or theoretical framework will do this for you):
Student: But that’s exactly my problem: to stop. I have to complete this Ph.D.; I have just eight more months. You always say “more descriptions,” but this is like Freud, indefinite analysis. When do you stop? My actors are all over the place. Where should I go? What is a complete description?
Professor: Now that’s a good question because it’s a practical one. As I always say: a good thesis is a thesis that is done. But there is another way to stop than by “adding an explanation” or “putting it into a frame.”
S: Tell me it then.
P: You stop when you have written your 80,000 words or whatever is the format. (Latour, 2004a, p. 68)
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