Frequently Asked Questions

Categories » The News about Networks 2

Introduction | Program | FAQ's

Practicalities

Where and when is the workshop?
How many people can attend?
What do I bring?
Where can I stay in Amsterdam?
What happens when I arrive?
Who's coming?
What are we going to do at the workshop?
Software: Political Instruments & Information Tools?
Are there publications that I can read?
Further questions?
Small Glossary of Terms
Govcom.org Foundation?

Where and when is the workshop?

On 21 June the workshop starts at 10:00am at de Balie Center for Politics and Culture, Leidseplein, Amsterdam. The address for de Balie is: Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10. The workshop room is called the "Salon". We'll have a registration and info table. The workshop ends with a public presentation, Thursday evening, the 24th of June.

How many people can attend?

The workshop can host about 15-20 participants. There will be about 7 people from Govcom.org there, too - theorists, methodologists and data collection assistants. There will also be a technician assigned to us by de Balie.

What do I bring?

Bring your skills and your software tools to share. Bring your laptop with ethernet connectivity. Wireless is available.

Where can I stay in Amsterdam?

We will offer to make a reservation for you. We'll provide some hotel choices in advance to you by email. You'll have to confirm the reservation and pay for the hotel yourself.

What happens when I arrive?

You'll be welcomed warmly. The cafe at de Balie opens at 10am, so there will be fresh coffee available.

Who's coming?

We'll provide a list of people who are pretty sure they'll be coming.

What are we going to do at the workshop?

We're going to locate, analyse and map 'issue networks', and subsequently conduct textual and semantic analyis of the substance of these networks. We are interested in learning how the "rights" and "justice" networks mobilise constituencies. We'll also have presentations by participants as well as some invitees, in between mapping. On Thursday evening we will have a public program, where we will present our results, in the form of maps, info designs, and stories. We also will make maps and info designs for take home, and put them up on the Web for download.

Software: Political Instruments & Information Tools?

These are pieces of software that do politics. We have made a few, with our collaborators, Oneworld.net, Andermedia.nl, Recognos.ro and Aguidel.com. The software projects have been funded by the Open Society Institute (Budapest/New York) as well as Infodrome, the Dutch government information society project.

The Instruments and Tools are:

IssueCrawler.net. The IssueCrawler is server-side crawler, analysis and visualisation software that does co-link analysis of hyperlinks, locates densely interlinked networks of organizations (pages) that have to do with the same issue, and visualises 'issue networks' in circles (or 'virtual roundtables') and clusters. The software is at http://www.issuecrawler.net. You will receive an account.

Issue Barometer. This is a set of indicators for issue networks, such as 'heat', 'debate activity' and 'de-territorialisation'. It hasn't been properly 'built', but we sometimes use the methods for issue network analysis.

Infoid.org. The Web Issue Index of Civil Society follows the campaigning behaviour of stable baskets of civil society organizations, charting the attention they give to issues. The Web Issue Index, a quicklaunch application as well as an interactive screensaver, delivers, in ticker form, rising and falling issues, each issue's 'sub-issues' as well as each sub-issues 'infoid', the one URL most currently referenced by the baskets.

Viagratool.org. Viagratool is a 'lay decision support system', created through occasional (manual) collaborative filtering exercises, where we ask, What is Viagra and whom is it (really) for?

Each of these tools are written up at http://www.govcom.org, under Information Politics on the Web.

Are there publications that I can read?

We try to keep the publication list fairly up-to-date and put them all online, at http://www.govcom.org/full_list.html. You also are invited to write to us, and request others by post. Direct queries to Richard Rogers.

Further questions?

If there is something we haven't covered, please write to Catherine Somze, the govcom.org workshop producer, at catherine@issuenetwork.org. You also may write directly to the workshop organizer, Richard Rogers.

Small Glossary of Terms

issue
an issue is a claim that has been formatted in such a way (as a policy document, demonstration, boycott etc) that it circulates and attracts actors to network around it, turning 'it' into a collective cause of concern.

issue network
an issue network is a heterogenous set of entities (actors, documents, slogans etc) that have configured around an issue, in the above sense, whose specific contours provide clues to its (social) life expectancy.

the social life (expectancy) of an issue
the social life (expectancy) of an issue depends upon the extent to which actors attach itself to it (in the above sense) and the extent to which those actors cause the issue to drift or remain 'in state'.

issue drift
issue drift is the term employed to describe the re-organisation of an issue space towards or away from the issue by the appearance of actors attached to other issues, and the subsequent network draw exerted by those actors to other issues.

Govcom.org Foundation?

The Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating and hosting info-political tools on the Web. A list of the people involved, the previous projects and other collaborations are below.

Govcom.org Foundation Principal Project Grants & Work

"News about Networks workshops," Ford Foundation, New York, 2003-2004.

Project members and associates:
Richard Rogers
Noortje Marres
Andrei Mogoutov
Marieke van Dijk
Auke Touwslager
Catherine Somze
Erik Borra
Koen Martens
Greg Elmer
Andres Zelman
Zachary Devereaux
Astrid Mager
Workshop participants

Software and Web research projects:

Maps

• Israeli "Security Fence": Which news sources use which terms for the "fence"? (June 2004) [gif] [pdf]
• Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline: News analysis (June 2004) [gif] [pdf] [paper ref - pdf]
• The State of U.S. Democracy: Relationships between advocates' budgets and activities in the Media Concentration oppositional space (June 2004) [gif] [pdf]
• Political Blogsphere - U.S. (June 2004) [blog list (gif)][blogsphere network map (gif)] [lexical analysis (gif)] [semantic analysis (gif)]
  
• Dutch Political Parties configuring around issues in European Parliamentary Elections (June 2004) [by party (gif)][by political orientation (gif)] [by party standing (gif)]
  
• FCC Public Hearings: Diversity, Localism and Public Interest (June 2004) [blogsphere analysis (gif)] [news analysis (gif)]
  
• FCC and Public Interest Blogtalk (June 2004) [gif]
• Moveon.org and "Bush Lies" (November 2003) Moveon.org and "Bush Lies" (November 2003) [gif] [story]
  
• Premediation: The News and the Usage of 'inevitability' (November 2003) [gif] [story]
  
• Democracy as Third-world Issue (November 2003) [gif] [story]
  
• Media Reform around the World (November 2003) [gif] [story]
  
• Media Reform Actors on the Web, Madison event (November 2003) [cluster gif] [circle gif] [story]
  
• Minority Media Ownership Actors on the Web (November 2003) [gif] [story]
  
• ICTs and Civil Society: A comparison of the news and Web spaces organized by "ICT" versus "IT (November 2003) [gif] [findings summary] [story]
  
• The Spectrum: Doing quite well without news (November 2003) [gif] [story] [pdf]
  
• North Korea: Which stories are not told (in the U.S.)? (November 2003) [gif] [pdf] [story] [publication]

Articles

• R. Rogers, "Old and New Media: Competition and Political Space," Theory & Event, forthcoming 2005.(pdf)
• R. Rogers, "Poignancy in the U.S. Political Blogsphere," Aslib Proceedings, forthcoming 2005.(pdf)
• N. Marres and R. Rogers, "Subsuming the Ground: How Local Realities of the Ferghana Valley, the Narmada Dams and the BTC Pipeline are put to use on the Web," Social Science Research Council, New York, unpublished ms., 2004. (pdf)
  
• R. Rogers et al., "The News about Networks," Proceedings from the workshop, de Balie, Amsterdam, December 2003.

"Political Instruments for the Web," Infodrome, Netherlands, 2000-2002.

Project members and associates:
Richard Rogers
Marieke van Dijk
Auke Touwslager
Steffie Verstappen
Sylvie van der Meerendonk
Jorrie Horsthuis
Luke Pendrell
Martin Aberdeen
Swanko.co.uk
Recognos.ro
Politiek-digitaal.nl

From Infodrome:
Krijn van Beek
Ira van Keulen
Mei Li Vos
Marie-Jose Klaver, NRC Handelsblad

Software and Web research projects:

• Viagratool.org, Lay decision support system, 2001-2002. (manual collaborative filtering web site), http://www.govcom.org/viagratool/
• Issue Barometer, metrics for heat, intensity, territorialisation and globalisation of an issue, 2001. (indicators of issue network properties)
• Web Issue Index, 2001-2002, http://www.infoid.org/
• Election Issue Tracker, press attention graphing tool for election issues, 2001-2002, http://tools.issuecrawler.net/eig/html/

Publications:

R. Rogers (2003), "The Viagra Files: The Web as Anticipatory Medium," Prometheus, 21, 2, 195-212.

R. Rogers and M.-J. Klaver (2002), Info.gov: Politieke Instrumenten voor het Web, Amsterdam: Infodrome.

"Issue Network Mapping Software", funded by the Internet Program, Soros Foundation, New York, 2001.

Govcom.org members and associates:
Richard Rogers
Noortje Marres
Marieke van Dijk
Auke Touwslager
Catherine Somzé
Greg Elmer (Boston College)
David Heath (OneWorld International, London)
Suzi Wells (OneWorld International)
Christian Haslacher (University of Vienna)
Christian Toepfner (University of Vienna)
Heidi Weinhaeupl (University of Vienna)
Jodi Dean (Visiting Professor, University of Vienna)

Outcomes:

• Issue Crawler server-side software (beta)
• "The Social Life of Issues," four one-week issue network theory and software design workshops held at the Center for Communication and Culture (c3.hu), Budapest, 2001, at http://www.govcom.org/workshops.html.
• Workshop: Social Life of Issues, 18-21 April 2001.
• Workshop: Social Life of Issues 2: Issue Network Types and Features, 22-26 May 2001.
• Workshop: Social Life of Issues 3: Dis-aggregating Global Civil Society, 20-26 June 2001.
• Workshop: Social Life of Issues 4: Competing Realities - The Social Lives of Issues on and off the Web, 23-28 July 2001.

"Visualisation Module for the Issue Crawler" and "Issue Crawler Hosting, 2002", two grants from the Open Society Institute, 2002.

Outcomes:

• New Issue Crawler cluster visualisation module.
• Implementation of new visualisation module on issuecrawler.net.

"Workshop: Mapping Central Asian and Caucasian Issues," funded by the Open Society Institute, Budapest, 2001.

Govcom.org members and associates:
Richard Rogers
Noortje Marres
Marieke van Dijk
Auke Touwslager
Catherine Somzé
Greg Elmer (Boston College)
Andres Zelman

Outcomes:

• Mapping Central Asian and Caucasian Issues, workshop, held at C3, Budapest, 8-14 November 2001, at http://www.govcom.org/work_asian.html.
• Central Asian & Caucasian Issue Network Maps on Anti-corruption, Ferghana Valley Conflict, Karabagh Conflict, Independent Media in Georgia and Russia, and Media Freedom.

"Workshop: The Network Effects of Civil Society (Politics)," funded by the Open Society Institute, Budapest, 2002.

Govcom.org members and associates:
Richard Rogers
Noortje Marres
Marieke van Dijk
Auke Touwslager
Catherine Somzé
Andres Zelman
Greg Elmer (Boston College)
Andrei Mogoutov (Ecole des Mines/Aguidel.com)

Outcome:

• The Network Effects of Civil Society (Politics), held at C3, Budapest, 15-21 May 2002, http://www.govcom.org/gco_projects/workshops/6/presentation/

"Web Geographies," Design & Media Research Fellowship, carried out at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, 1999-2000, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; the Province of Limburg and the City of Maastricht.

Members:
Richard Rogers (Research Fellow)
Noortje Marres (Theorist-in-residence)
Stephanie Hankey (Designer-in-residence)
Ian Morris (Programmer-in-residence)
Alex Bruce Wilkie (Design research associate)
Nick Durrant (Seconded from MetaDesign, London)
Andres Zelman (Seconded from University of Amsterdam)
Anja Lutz (book designer)
Peter Bilak (day designer / map co-designer)

Outcomes:

• Netlocator software, 'dumb' crawler and simple co-link machine
• GM food debate map (inserted in Preferred Placement)
• The Rogue & the Rogued: Amongst the Web Tacticians, video, description at http://www.govcom.org/r_r_video.html
• Web Epistemology Symposium, de Waag, Society for Old & New Media, Amsterdam, October 1999.
• "Rogue Cookies", Book launch event, de Balie Center for Politics and Culture, Amsterdam, March 2000.

Publication:

R. Rogers (2000), Ed., Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, Jan van Eyck Editions, Maastricht and de Balie, Amsterdam.