https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0738-0179
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ABSTRACT
Attending to the role of visualizations in discourse formations allows for detecting the emergence of particular visual storylines. This article studies the emergence of visual storylines in energy policy, in particular shale gas controversies. The analysis is based on data gathered in three internet regions: the Netherlands, New York State, and South Africa. The analysis studies how visualizations may contribute to confirmation, disintegration, integration, or polarization of discourse coalitions due to similarities or differences between visual and discursive storylines. From the results, we suggest the notion of visual discourse coalitions (VDCs) to contribute to the study of visualizations and discourses in policy controversies. We define a VDC as a network of actors that share a similar discursive storyline and a similar visual storyline of the controversy. The article shows that visualizations and their graphic characteristics add another dimension to the formation of discourse coalitions and the way they develop, connect, or disconnect.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Elaine Teixeira Rabello, Gabriel Valerio-Ureña , and Andrea Benedetti for the collaborative actor analysis using digital methods conducted as part of a visit to the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School 2018 at the University of Amsterdam. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Hamburg, 2018, the International Conference in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Essex, 2019, and the International Seminar Visual Framing of Food Technologies, Wageningen, 2019. We are grateful to the participants in those conferences for their feedback. We are also greatly indebted to Jennifer Dodge, to Public Administration and Policy group members, and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In this article, we do not distinguish between a still camera and a motion picture camera, and we refer to the static images that are combined to create an illusion of motion, as photographs.
2 We used the digital snowballing technique (Rogers, Citation2013, p. 23) to find internet actors. We used Google scraper with the keywords ‘shale gas’, ‘hydraulic fracturing’, and ‘fracking’ (search terms based on previous studies, see Finkeldey, Citation2018; Hopke & Simis, Citation2017; Stoutenborough et al., Citation2016) to identify the top-ranked URLs discussing shale gas in each internet region according to Google PageRank metrics. These page-rank metrics indicate the most popular online voices. We extracted actors’ names (manually and with the help of Aylien Text Analysis API tool) from the results.
3 We used the menu of the website, and when that did not lead to any results we used Google search within a domain with the same keywords that were used to identify actors.
4 We excluded advertisements and other unrelated content on the websites.
5 Frame codes were: Bridge fuel or cleaner energy source (Bomberg, Citation2017a; Metze, Citation2017), David v Goliath (Bomberg, Citation2017a), Delay transition to sustainable energy (Metze, Citation2017), Drop in the ocean (Metze, Citation2017), Economic opportunity (Bomberg, Citation2017a; Dodge & Lee, Citation2017), Environmental/health risks (Bomberg, Citation2017a; Dodge & Lee, Citation2017; Metze, Citation2017), Geopolitics (Bomberg, Citation2017a; Cuppen et al., Citation2016; Dodge & Lee, Citation2017), Known risks (Weible et al., Citation2016), Landowner rights (Dodge, Citation2015; Dodge & Lee, Citation2017), Technique is safe and nothing new (Metze, Citation2017), Water scarcity (Andreasson, Citation2018; Atkinson, Citation2018).
6 See https://www.nrdc.org/stories/delaware-river-basin-partial-fracking-ban-partial-victory. For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200718075153/https://www.nrdc.org/stories/delaware-river-basin-partial-fracking-ban-partial-victory.
7 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200818095925/https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/life-not-pretty-picture-fracking-epicenter-photography-people.
8 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200614062027/http://www.dmr.gov.za/mineral-policy-promotion/shale-gas.
9 See http://www.geoscience.org.za/index.php/key-projects/754-the-karoo-deep-drilling-project. For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200820185037/https://www.geoscience.org.za/index.php/key-projects/754-the-karoo-deep-drilling-project
10 According to Schlumberger's Oilfield Glossary, sweet spot is ‘a target location or area within a play or a reservoir that represents the best production or potential production [of shale gas]’ (https://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/en/Terms/s/sweet_spot.aspx, accessed 6 September 2019).
11 Source: https://www.treasurethekaroo.co.za/about, accessed 19 February 2020.
12 Source: http://seasgd.csir.co.za/12-may-2015-project-launch/, accessed 19 February 2020.
13 See for example http://karoospace.co.za/windmills-windpumps-or-windpompe/, accessed 12 February 2020.
14 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20190921084552/https:/www.treasurethekaroo.co.za.
15 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200721221919/http://seasgd.csir.co.za.
16 Source: https://www.treasurethekaroo.co.za/, accessed 19 February 2020.
17 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200820185737/https://www.hess.com/sustainability/environment/shale-energy.
18 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20200708025845/https://marcelluscoalition.org/marcellus-shale/production-processes/casing-the-well.
19 See https://wri.cals.cornell.edu/research-topics/shale-gas/groundwater-impacts. For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20190614151951/https://wri.cals.cornell.edu/research-topics/shale-gas/groundwater-impacts.
20 For an archived copy of the webpage visit https://web.archive.org/web/20191203151433/https://www.schaliegasvrij.nl.
21 Cuadrilla's Dutch site (www.cuadrillaresources.nl) was accessed in December 2018. The site is no longer available.
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Notes on contributors
Efrat Gommeh
Efrat Gommeh is a PhD candidate at the Public Administration and Policy group, Wageningen University & Research. She has been trained in Design Management and in Science, Technology and Society (STS). Her research focuses on the role of visualizations in controversies over technological developments.
Huub Dijstelbloem
Huub Dijstelbloem is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Politics at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) in The Hague. He works on the intersection of philosophy of science and technology and political philosophy. His research engages with questions concerning democracy and technology and the politics of border control and migration policies. Dijstelbloem has been affiliated to University of California San Diego and the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Centre for Policy Analysis, Mozambique. His research has been published in Nature, Security Dialogue, Geopolitics, International Political Sociology, and Journal of Borderland Studies.
Tamara Metze
Tamara Metze is associate professor in the Public Administration and Policy group, Wageningen University and Research. She works at the intersection of public administration and science and technology studies. Her research concerns questions about the possibility of democratic innovations, with special interest in deliberation, boundary objects, framing, scenario development, energy and food controversies, and urban planning. Metze is project leader of the NWO-MVI project Travelling of Framed Facts and Uncertainties. Her research has been published in a.o. Environmental Communication, Journal of Cleaner Production, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.