Since February of this year we have been running the second version of the Issue Mapping for Politics course where students have engaged in climate change controversy mapping through three periods of the controversy: (1) the very existence of climate change, skepticism and causes, (2) mitigation (quantified self approach and carbon market approach), and (3) adaptation. Climate change issue experts have been involved in each of these stages. More precisely, they were invited to describe and present the state of affairs of their fields and tell us about their analytical needs. Based on these presentations students were asked to produce maps. Afterwards, we will organise a follow up with the issue experts to present them with the maps, and engage with them concerning the extent to which they meet their needs, including any new needs that arise from reading the maps.

During the EMAPS meeting last month, the University of Amsterdam presented field notes from our work with these climate change issue experts. Below is a summary of some of the most relevant things we learned from them, which we consider could be useful to other project members working with issue experts. The slides from our talk can be found here:

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This blog post is a response to Axel’s post asking each partner to rethink their work according to the new strategy discussed in the project meeting back in December. It details the work that the University of Amsterdam will be conducting in this second year of the project.

Over a period of 16 weeks, which started in the first week of February,  the University of Amsterdam will be running the Issue Mapping for Politics course. The course takes students through four different mapping methodologies and theories: controversy mapping in the style of Bruno Latour and Tomasso Venturini, risk cartography using Ulrich Beck’s theories about global risks, critical and neo-cartography using Jeremy Crampton guidelines on the subject, and finally issue mapping techniques developed at the University of Amsterdam.

Students are encouraged to apply these methods and theories on mapping climate change. We are aiming to study climate change controversies through three periods: (1) climate change existence, skepticism and causes, (2) mitigation (personal approach and market approach), and (3) adaptation. This practical part of the course is where the University of Amsterdam will be implementing the new project strategy discussed in December. In each class we are inviting one issue expert: one climate change skepticism expert, one carbon trader, one carbon footprint quant, and one city auditor to talk to students about their work in these areas and about their mapping needs. The students are invited to produce maps and visualisations in response to these discussions with climate change experts. In parallel we will connect with the Guardian Datablog and other media organisations in order to understand mapping needs of yet another important category of users, and aim to collaboratively produce maps and visualisations that are of interest to the Datablog and other publications.

In terms of the project plan and description of work, there is one main change that we anticipate. According to the Gantt chart, in the second year of the project, the main contributions that the University of Amsterdam brings are the release of D1.2 “Recommendations and guidelines for the project” in March, which will consist of the ageing book, now in its final stages of production, and the work under work package 4, “Platform development and community building.” The UvA can include the engagement with expert users and production of climate change maps and visualisations in this work package. In this case, the starting date of the work package, which is now the second half of the year, would need to be changed to February 2013. The outcome of the work will be documented on the EMAPS platform and included in one of the final deliverables, due in the last month of the project.

On December 12 2012, the EMAPS project organized its first Issue Safari.
Such workshop was an improved version of the seminar we organized in June 2012. In both cases the objective was to submit some of a set of maps we had prepared on the theme of aging in UK to the evaluation of a selected group of potential users.
The first workshop had been very interesting, but had also revealed the great difficulty of finding a common ground between mappers and users. Users were very critical on several aspects: from the choice of the research questions, to the datased employed, from the visualisations employed to the legibility of the maps (see emapsproject.com/blog/archives/1329).
In order to overcome this difficulty, we started a new process of interaction with the users (described here emapsproject.com/blog/archives/1701, here emapsproject.com/blog/archives/1728 and here emapsproject.com/blog/archives/1754). This process helped us to produce a more effective set of maps and to identify a groups of users potentially more interested in our visualisations. The December Issue Safari was the result of this process.

I think it is fair to say that the Issue Safari has been a success in the sense that we have greatly improved the adaptation between users and maps. Most users found most maps relevant and engaged with them in interesting ways. This allowed us to collect a richer user-feedback that we will now be able to re-invest in the case study of climate change adaptation.

Drawing on a very detailed set of notes collected during the Safari by the facilitator of the Young Foundation and compiled by Lucy Kimbell, I have prepared the following synthesis of the lessons we learnt during this workshop

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In a recent study, we analysed the interactions between self-proclaimed Democrats and Repubblicans in Wikipedia.

We started from the identification of users having in their personal page a userbox indicating support for one of the two major US parties. In this way, we were able to identify about 800 Democrats and 600 Republicans.

This allowed us to study representation practices, activity and interactions of these two sets of users according to several dimensions, such as the kind of the other userboxes they had in their profile, the articles most edited by each party, the presence of conflict in the threads in which they were involved, and the emotional content of their messages.

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Ahead of our two-day workshop in London later this week, I present some suggestions that follow on from our discussions in the project team about we can engage productively with people who might use the issue maps we are creating in the project. As I understand it, the role of The Young Foundation in the EMAPS project is primarily about helping to engage with people beyond the project team, specifically with the communities of issue professionals working on the two topics.

This post builds on recent emails and skype meetings between us; our small workshop in Oxford in October (see posts by Michele and Benedetta in Milano and by me afterwards, with comments by other EMAPS team members), as well as our June meeting in London (see posts by Tommaso) and discussions about the design process by Milano and Paris.

I will cover

• a narrative about the project’s trajectory to date in terms of engaging with issue professionals, written from a personal perspective as someone working within YF on EMAPs since March 2012 (when I was employed there, and now freelance);
• a brief introduction to some concepts and methods from the fields of Participatory Design and Design Research, which offer some approaches that could move EMAPS towards a more participatory mode of designing/using maps in the context of a research project;
• a speculative description of what these concepts and methods might look like in practice, if the EMAPS team decided to use them.

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We have recently started to work with an interesting additional data-source for Wikipedia data: the number of views per hour a specific Wikipedia page receives. This data is available at this website http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/ and contains view data since 2008.

Below we present three examples of the temporal evolution in  the interest a specific Wikipedia article generates. Until now we have extracted and processed view data from 2008 till March 2010, more data is being currently downloaded.

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In this post we have drawn the network of hyperlinks connecting Wikipedia articles related to climate change. Now we will focus on how to identify the most central articles in the network.

Applying different metrics we can study which issues are more central within our set of articles according to different criteria:

• In/Out-degree: number of incoming/outgoing links. It measure centrality as the number of connections with other nodes.
• Pagerank: like in-degree, but the weight of each incoming connection depends on the importance of the corresponding node; weights are computed iteratively. It can be seen as the probability of reaching a node when following a random walk in the graph.
• Betweenness: number of shortest paths from all vertices to all others that pass through the given node (i.e.: how often the given node lies on the shortest path between a pair of nodes). It quantifies the importance of a node as a bridge between different nodes or groups in the network.
• Closeness: Average distance from a node to all the other nodes in the network. It represents centrality as the ability to reach the other nodes in few steps.

On October 12, we met in London Maria Parsons, Margaret Melling from MM Consulting, Penny Thewlis and Diana Roberts from Age UK. The meeting was mediated by our Young Foundation partners Lucy Kimbell and Kat Jurgnickel.

Our aim was to have feedback from a group of users playing an important role in the Ageing controversy, in order to get a consistent assessment on the analyzed data and on the graphic solutions of the latest visualizations.

The visualizations were based on a dataset provided by Sciences Po and aimed to answer three questions decided together with Young Foundation and Maria Parsons:

1. What is living well with dementia?
2. What are the public health and social care messages about ageing and dementia?
3. Are older people assets or deficits?
Each issue had been studied by Sciences Po in order to focus better on data available on the net, through digital methods, and formulate more specific questions.

Q1: What is living well with dementia?
a-Which online resources aim at helping people to live well with dementia?

The first set of data was built with the aim to understand which resources are available online to help older people with dementia. Sciences Po selected then a list of dementia-related blogs run by elderly people living in UK.

This first visualization shows the links between these blogs.

 

PROS: Users demonstrated a certain interest in this map because it highlights the connections and relationships between blogs, which wouldn’t be immediately understandable while netsurfing.

CONS: Unrelated blogs were presented as a separated list, which was interpreted as a legend at first.

As a second step we showed the same set of data spatialized with Gephi.

 

PROS: Most of the users expressed a preference for this visualization because it emphasizes clusters while connections are easier to read compared to the first graphic solution.
CONS: One of the users remarked that this type of representation looks chaotic and complicated; she compared it to a spider web.

In the following step the blogs in the corpus have been crawled in order to build a second, wider network. Since the results of the crawl were not yet available, we built a sample dataset and used it to develop different visualizations.

 

It was very difficult for the users to focus on the visualization since they knew it was built on a sample dataset, so we were able to get just a few feedbacks:
- Table 1: ”There is too much data, it would be better to remove the connections between the blogs already showed in the first visualization.”
- Table 2 (tree map): This kind of representation isn’t easy to understand for those who had never seen it, while those who could already read it, aren’t able to compare the areas size.

Q2: What are the public health and social care messages about ageing and dementia?
a- Which linguistic expressions are most frequently used by public health and social care institutions when talking about aging and dementia?

This visualization shows a bipartite network between documents and keywords. It’s the result of a semantic analysis of Ageing and Dementia related documents provided by the Young Foundation.
The visualization highlights the most important keywords and their links to the documents.

 

 

PROS: Users seem very interested in the network, although they didn’t immediately understand it. However the visualization could potentially be useful. Thanks to the mediation of Mrs. Parsons, the other users were able to find the clusters and to explain us the closeness of some keywords to the documents.
They also suggested to create a similar visualization to show the evolution of blogs and websites over the course of time and to build interactive visualizations to favour the exploration of the data.

CONS:
- At a first glance they couldn’t understand the difference between a network and a tagcloud. One of the users referred to as the biggest node of the network as a“big centre of something”, without understanding the structure of the visualization she was watching.

- They didn’t understand the spatialization made with Gephi, they erroneously thought that only the documents and the keywords in the center of the network were important.

- They tried to follow the links but they expressed some confusion.
-They were confused by the use of the same node shape for documents and keywords

On the basis of their feedback we think it would be useful to create a guided exploration of the maps, helping users to read them. One possible solution could be to create some overlapping levels that explain the data collection process and the creation of the network.

 

Q3: Are older people assets or deficits?
a- In different European web-spheres, which images are used to picture older people?

This third set of visualizations aims to show the results of a search on Google Images. The data were collected from Sciences Po, using “Old Age” as a query translated into various languages and searched in the different national domains of Google.
The images obtained were classified according to two criteria:
- Older people portrayed as active and healthy / Older people portrayed as ill or in need
- Ageing portrayed as an enjoyable period of life / Ageing portrayed as suffering

 

PROS: They thought it’s useful to understand how people with dementia are represented and it could be useful also related to other media.

CONS: -They expressed their interest for the visualization, but they didn’t look carefully at the pictures or compare the results in different countries.
They showed some difficulty in understanding the importance of this set of data in relation to their work and they couldn’t tell if the classification made sense.

 

Conclusions
Users were very fascinated by the possibility to obtain data from the web, to create relations and visualize them, making information accessible to the public.

We noticed that users were interested in the data only when they were explicitly involved or represented in the visualizations.

One of the users underlined the importance to promote a collaboration between the stakeholders, and to create a dialogue between who collects the data and the final users to make visualizations answering their needs.

This experience remarked that the only way to understand the real effectiveness of the diagrams is to observe users interacting with them, while direct questions about the meaningfulness of the maps don’t lead to a reliable feedback.

Question 1: What is living well with dementia?

a-Which online resources aim at helping people to live well with dementia?
—— Young Foundation dataset

 

 —— SAMPLE DATA

 

—— SAMPLE DATA

 

Question 2: What are the public health and social care messages about ageing and dementia?
a- Which linguistic expressions are most frequently used by public health and social care institutions when talking about aging and dementia?

 

Question 3: Are older people assets or deficits?
a- In different European web-spheres, which images are used to picture older people?

 

 

 

What are issue maps and what are they for?

The aim of this post is to share some reflections following our session exploring the most recent batch of maps with potential users in Oxford last Friday. Three of us who were there agreed to write posts: Michele Mauri from Milano who is leading the work on the design of the maps; Kat Jungnickel, a freelancer with a background in ethnography/STS who has been doing participant observation with an issue professional for The Young Foundation, and me. Mine will focus on the interesting and difficult questions that lie at the heart of the EMAPS project: What could the maps be (and for who), what are they for, and how do we work together to create them in an iterative process? My questions and attempts at answers are situated in the project’s work over recent months on the topic of ageing, and my own practice/research in social design and service design.

The Young Foundation’s role in the EMAPS project is about public engagement – helping identify and engage participants in the project who are probably not researchers (in the academy) but what Richard Rogers calls ‘issue professionals’, for whom research is probably part of their work. At our EMAPS meeting in mid-June 2012, we (my former colleague Jacques Mizan and I) brought together around 25 such people from the UK working in different ways in relation to the ageing issue, from different kinds of organizational context from consultants, public service managers, to volunteers, to care workers. We found it hard to work out who to invite (and get them in the room) because we were not sure what the proposed issue maps on ageing might be for. We know that the EMAPS project aims to design maps of controversies and explore their purposes in relation to complex collective issues. But in our day-to-day interactions we did not find it easy to summarise the project when talking to our colleagues within The Young Foundation or in discussion with potential participants. We did not understand how such maps might fit within the work practices of people who work within the ageing issue, which are of course diverse and shaped by different kinds of professional expertise and knowledge.

The EMAPS-wide project discussion that followed that workshop in June then lead to our next phase of work, which took us in a new direction: away from showing people the latest maps and asking for feedback, or asking what they might do with them, or what other maps they might find useful, towards understanding one issue professional’s work practices, and designing maps for her as a kind of lead user (von Hippel 1986). From Kat’s analysis of Maria’s work practices (documented earlier on this blog), the EMAPS team in Paris and Milano then created maps that aimed to help her answer her ‘research questions’. So on Friday, we created a workshop in two sessions. First we showed Maria the latest maps (lead by Kat and Michele and Benedetta) and got Maria’s responses drawing on her deeper knowledge of the project through her work with Kat. We also asked for her feedback about what we planned to do after lunch, when we broadened the discussion by bringing in three other ageing issue professionals, known to Maria. We (Kat and I) had decided that rather than asking for their feedback, we wanted to elicit responses to the maps by asking them to try to do some tasks with them – which we checked with Maria.

We thought that giving these professionals opportunities to try to use the maps to perform a task similar to the sorts of things they already do, and then watching and interviewing them as they did this, would give us insights into the research questions within EMAPS. After a brief introduction to Map 2 (the “milky way” map that shows linguistic terms drawn from a corpus of documents on ageing and dementia, we asked them to do the following tasks:

 

MAP 2: What are the public health and social care messages about ageing and dementia?

TASK (work together): You are developing a campaign aimed at people to increase awareness around the parents and neighbours having dementia. What are the core messages you want to communicate? Use the map to see.

Having presented a task relevant to their world, the participants then looked at the maps as they began to try to think through what the map was presenting them with. Quite quickly we moved away from the task. Later, we did not insist on using the task we had prepared for Map 1 as by then the conversations flowed well and also the sense of asking “What would I do with this map?” By they time we looked at the set of maps of type Map 3 (images from Google searches for ageing), we no longer needed a task to get them to engage, but we did repeatedly ask what they might use these maps for and how and when.

This approach draws heavily on a design/research field I will go on to explore a bit later. As well as actively participating in the session (Michele, Benedetta, Kat and I) we also documented the activities with audio, video, photography and taking notes.

 

Here are some of my initial observations – which may appear bleedingly obvious to some of our research partners – but are perhaps worth of noting down here, if only to show much work it takes to involve someone who is not a specialist in digital methods or issue mapping, in understanding what the maps might be (for) and what it takes for them to be of use. They may of course be completely different to the views of Kat, Michele and Benedetta although we of course discussed what we did, what we observed and participated in and what we made of it through the day.

 

Finding 1

The maps can only ‘work’ if these aspects come together:

-       An understanding of the user’s worlds and work practices and the purposes to which maps can be put

-       Data and their provenance, relevance and reliability that fit with the user’s requirements in relation to the things they want to achieve

-       A method that translates what the user might want to achieve in her world, into a research question, into a question that a map could answer, into a way to gather data and analyse it for presentation within a map

-       A visual presentation of the data/question/key/legend that fits within the understandings the user has about her world

 

Finding 2

The maps can be used for these purposes (and probably many others):

-       Understanding the ageing issue and how it is constituted

-       Reframing or thinking differently about the ageing issue based on what the maps show

-       Provoking discussion about controversies within ageing between different people looking at or using maps

-       Verifying or challenging an existing understanding of the ageing issue

-       Seeing new sets of relationships (eg between actors or linguistic terms or concepts) in relation to the ageing issue

 

Finding 3

We need to do more work to understand how these various purposes come into play in different professional contexts and through various disciplinary practices. From observing the four issue professionals in the room in Oxford we noted quite different responses to the same map, even though they shared some common projects and knowledge about the ageing issue and its actors. For example one participant said that the map of linguistic expressions from the corpus of documents (Map 2 – the milky way map) was not useful, whereas two others strongly believed it was and that it was something they could use for example to help them align their own grant-funding bids or proposals to funders’ or commissioner’s current concerns. While this is partly the result of the visual presentation of the data, it is also about how participants grappled with understanding what the map is, and where the data come from, and what the map offers them as a resource. We suspect that these responses are shaped by many factors including cognitive and learning styles, and disciplinary practices about how research and strategy are done in organizations of different kinds.

Other perspectives

I now want to turn to a field that I think EMAPS can learn from, and which has certainly shaped how The Young Foundation (through my interventions) has participated in the project. Participatory Design (PD) is a field that combines a Scandinavian political/social commitment to worker empowerment, with a practical understanding of collective design. Much of the research/practice in PD has focused on the design of software. One of the leading contributors to PD is Pelle Ehn (see Ehn 1988). More recently several researchers (who often design software as part of their research) are exploring STS/ANT in relation to this design work (eg Ehn 2008; Binder et al 2011; Andersen et al 2011).

Some of the learning in this field is:

-       How to understand and design for “use” (eg within existing practices) and how “design” relates to use by re-configuring practices or involving the creation of new practices (eg Ehn 1988; Suchman et al 1998; Redstorm 2008).

-       How design-work can be thought of as performatively constituting the new relations between actors involved  (eg Hartswood et al 2002; Andersen et al 2011).

-       How to understand participation in design work eg thinking of their active participation as language games (Ehn 1988).

 

How we go forward

At our EMAPS meeting in June, we agreed that The Young Foundation would host an ‘issue safari’ in November 2012 bringing together a wider group of issue professionals working on ageing, to explore the latest iteration of the maps. In my email to the wider EMAPS team a couple of weeks ago, I again proposed that we create some tasks that are meaningful within the worlds of such professionals. We prototyped this approach in Oxford last Friday, and it worked well enough to provoke a conversation that surfaced what would the participants do with these maps, from which we then meandered onwards and outwards. In response Tommaso pointed out that the EMAPS researchers will be on hand to guide participants through the safari, which sounds great – until we have to explain it to someone who is a busy professional.

I now think we have a couple of options to consider before we finalise what we do at the end of November:

1. Find someone with an existing task related to ageing, that we could work in relation to and modify/create some maps for. An example from one of our participants from Friday is working on the creation of a new ‘Joint Strategic Needs Assessment’– a framework for gathering, sharing and interpreting data about needs relating to older people in Oxfordshire (in social care and healthcare). However I don’t think this is going to work for two reasons. First, although this project is happening and could suit our project in some ways, the data they need are mostly regional, not national or cross-European, and are probably not available online and therefore not available easily to EMAPS. Secondly, the participant did not find the maps we shared on Friday to be that useful although they were ‘interesting’. Although very involved in the collective sharing and use of data in relation to ageing, this participant seemed not to value the purposes I suggest above eg provoking discussion about controversies within ageing between different people looking at or using maps; verifying or challenging an existing understanding of the ageing issue; seeing new sets of relationships (eg between actors or linguistic terms or concepts) in relation to the ageing issue. So we don’t propose following this up.

2. Create some tasks in collaboration with a couple of participants (eg Maria – but she’s about to leave the UK for three months) which are recognizable to them and others and draw directly on their work practices. Eg further developing the tasks we proposed on Friday. I have had discussions with my Young Foundation colleague Sue Nunn who is now going to work on the EMAPS project with us, and she can identify several issue professionals within ageing/social care who she thinks do the kind of work of pattern recognizing/strategic overviewing that we think the maps support. We suspect that this will lead to requests from us to Paris/Amsterdam/Milano to adapt the current set of maps and possibly use new data (eg possibly documents they can supply us with). We’ll get back to you next week with more on this.

 

Some wider questions

And finally, a series of questions for EMAPS going forward. Please accept my apologies if I have misunderstood some aspects of the project and these questions are already taken care of in different ways.  Below I used the terminology from the Participatory Design field (“use” and “design”) – which may not be right (especially as they separate out design and use) but at least offer a way in to helping understand what the maps might be for, so EMAPS can design better maps.

 

-       Understanding use before design. In this ageing project, we were able to recruit Maria and use Kat to work closely with her to develop a shared understanding of her work practices to support EMAP designing maps that are more closely aligned to the questions she has. Are there plans for years 2&3 to learn from this and work closely with users (in the way Kat did) to translate their practices into research questions for maps, before designing and producing them? I know there is a conversation between EMAPS and the weADAPT community which involves sharing maps (or right now, wireframes of future maps) with them and asking for responses. However I am talking about something additional and in more depth – which involves using an ethnographic approach to studying the practices of people within the weADAPT community – not just asking them what they think of maps, after we have designed them.

-       Understanding use after design. Much of the researcher effort in EMAPS seems to focus on designing the methods, gathering the data, designing the maps and engaging participants, but I wonder if there might be resources to focus on how the maps get used as boundary objects (eg Carlile 2002) in work contexts: This would add a focus on how they are used once we are finished.

-       Involving participants directly in fast participatory design. There is another possibility, which draws on the PD tradition in another way which would look like this: inviting people from the weADAPT community to take part in a practical workshop with EMAPS, in which we do a very fast cycle of understanding their work practices and research questions, translating this to a set of questions that EMAPS could answer, creating questions and gathering data, and producing maps, and then watching what they do with them – all over two days.

Apologies for the busy blog post but I felt it was time to synthesize a number of conversations we’ve been having at The Young Foundation.

 

References

Andersen, T., Halse, J., Moll, J. (2011): Design Interventions as Multiple Becomings of Healthcare. Nordes ’11: the 4th Nordic Design Research Conference – Making Design Matter. Helsinki, Finland, May 29 -31, 2010. pp. 11-20.

Binder, T. Giorgio De Michelis, Pelle Ehn, Giulio Jacucci, Giulio Linde and Ina Wagner. 2011. Design Things. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Carlile, P. 2002. “A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development.” Organization Science, 13(4): 442-455.

Ehn, P. 1988. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ehn, P. 2008. “Participation in Design Things.” In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008 (PDC ’08). Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 92-101.

Hartswood, M., R. Procter, R. Slack, A. Voss, M. Büscher, and M. Rouncefield. 2002. “Co-realisation: towards a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design.” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2): 9–30.

Hippel, Eric (1986) “Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts,” Management Science 32, no. 7 (July): 791-805.

Redström, J. (2008). RE: Definitions of use. Design Studies, 29(4), 410-423.

Suchman, L., Blomberg, J., Orr, J., & Trigg, R. (1998). Reconstructing technologies as social practice. The American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3).