This post is the second of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

Let us go on by applying traditional controversy research to the web. One of the media digitalized and put onto the web are newspapers. Google News aggregates and ranks stories from thousands of international newspapers. The ranking is very traditional: by date, as well as by number of readers. Via Google as an interface, access to newspapers has changed: they are searchable, faster to consult, they contain more than in your local news outlet, national and language editions may be compared, etcetera.

In “Occupied and Unoccupied Media Spaces”, Anat Ben-David researched politics in a very traditional sense, comparing newspapers on the use of language and approach of an issue. Google News enabled her to make a traditional co-occurence analysis of terms and newspapers; she queried Google News for specific terms and counted the results per source. It is clear that Google News greatly helped her, as Anat did not have to get issues of all Palestinian, Israeli, and international newspapers and then go through all articles mentioning one of the terms.

In “Image Clash”, Anat Ben-David conducted similar research on Google Images: she compared the results for two different connotations of the same item: ‘Apartheid Wall’ vs ‘Security Fence’. The associated imagery clearly shows the term’s connotations.

Taking research into politics on the web one step further, NRC Handelsblad published an in-house study of home-grown right-wing Websites over the past few years (NRC Handelsblad, August 24, 2007). The most amazing line in the article, which seemed unusual for those accustomed to reading at least implicit distinctions between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’, read: “The Internet reflects the increasing toughening up [of the right-wing] in the Netherlands.” Thus here the Web becomes the site to study social trends. The question now turns into “how improbable is it to study right-wing movement trends without the Internet”?

Because of the internet, the amount of data explodes. Not only traditional research data (like geographical or census data) are digitalized; the ubiquity of the web also generates new kinds of data. As may be gathered from the NRC example, where one previously would embed himself with the ‘right-wing’ groups but report from a distance, the ‘digital methods’ question becomes how to collect and analyze data and distill trends from the web.

In journalism often the question about the journalists’ methods concerns the trustworthiness of a source. Going from one source to another once was a ‘social network’ issue. Who else should I speak to? That’s the question at the end of the interview, if trust had been established. The relationship between ‘who should I speak to’ and ‘who else do you link to’ is asymmetrical in journalism, but it is the question asked by search engines when recommending information. How to ponder the difference between source recommendations from verbal and online links? Is search the beginning of the quest for information, ending up with some grounded interview reality beyond the net, happily maintaining the divide between the real and the virtual? Or is that too simplistic? Our ideal source set divide (real or virtual, grounded or googled) raises the question of what’s next. What do we ‘look up’ after concluding the interview, to check the reality? At DMI we take a ‘natively digital’, medium specific, approach; e.g. by focusing on the link. It is hardly ever possible to simply import methods from other disciplines and assume that they will work on the internet as well.

Next: the politics of engines.