SCENARIO OF USE

Controversies can be viewed like trees, or mindmaps; their complexity is not only expressed in the uncertainty they embed, but also in the structuration of debates and in their articulation in sub-issues. Umbrella terms like climate change or nanotechnology act like aggregators of connected themes and disputes. Here we offer some fast tools and procedures that can help journalists and decision makers in detecting how a global issue is articulated and structured in its sub-themes.

TOOLS, METHODS, AND EXAMPLES

1. EXPLORE SUB-ISSUES AND THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR CONTROVERSY THROUGH THE WIKIMINDMAP TOOL

Wiki Mind Map? is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public wiki's, such as wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not always straight forward to find the information you are really looking for, especially in the case of complex controversies. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for. Pictures above show examples of topic structures for the issues of nanotechnology and climate change.

• wikimindmap for the nanotechnology issue:
  

• wikimindmap for the climate change issue:
  

2. SEARCH TAGS STRUCTURATION WITHIN DELICIOUS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SYSTEM

Delicious is a social bookmarking web serice for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The system can be used to retrieve information about tags provided by more than five million of users. This system represent also a profitable way to explore the relationship among tags related to a specific controversy, in order to detect sub-issues identifiedby the delicious community.

To search for tags related to a specific controversy, just type a keyword in the "search tag" box, in the Delicious homepage, on the right side of the webpage:

Links to 'related tags', our sub-issues, can be found in the right column of the search output page, displaying the ways in which Delicious usersbookmarked web content related to this umbrella term:

To investigate the sub-issues related to a specific tag, you can also use the Del.icio.us Related Tag scraper, a tool developed by the Amsterdam Govcom foundation to detect and visualize in form of a tag cloud association among tags.

SUGGESTED EXERCISE

Build your own map of the sub-issue and related themes for the issue of "swine flu", comparing results coming from the Wikimindmap and from Delicious.

BACK TO "EXPLORE MY OWN CONTROVERSY" MAIN PAGE

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Attachments of PlatformSubIssues