1 Manually extract pages on ‘what you can do’ from the sites in the issue network and from green living blogs.
2 Extract terms from these pages with the aid of the textual extraction and analysis application ‘Open Calais’ (using only industry terms).
3 Manually categorize terms, and count mentionings per category.
4 Use a ‘Dorling Visualizer’ tool to visualize the relative sizes of categories. 5 Use the ‘Analyzer’ tool to determine unique terms per category per source
set.
6 Manually mark up these unique terms using four values: economy, supply, usage and service.
7 Display unique terms per category per source set. For tools, see www.digitalmethods.nl.
Notes
1 The author would like to acknowledge the following contributions. The analysis of sustainable living blogs was performed together with Erik Borra, Esther Weltevrede, Michael Stevenson, and Rosa Menkman of the Digital Methods Group at the University of Amsterdam. The figures were designed by Christian Thumer and Matthew Falla, and Marieke van Dijk provided initial ideas. Thanks to Matthew Fuller, Philip Hill, Celia Lury, Esther Polak, Richard Rogers, and Steve Woolgar for suggestions and comments.
2 ‘As it is useful that while mankind is imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them’. (Mill, 1859/2002: 58)
3 The term equally resonates with more large-scale attempts to build environmental communities, such as the UK Garden Cities of the early twentieth century where people were to reconnect with nature in buildings open to the skies and built from local materials (Carter, 2007). Perhaps most familiarly, sustainable living was a pivotal genre of American-style post-1960 counter-culture green (Kirk, 2007). 4 No Impact Man, ‘What you need to know’, 22 February 2007, http://noimpactman.
typepad.com/blog/2007/02/what_you_need_t.html (accessed 30 April 2010). 5 Green-as-a-Thistle, ‘Hopelessly fridgeless (Day 78)’, 17 May 2007 http://
greenasathistle.com/2007/05/17/hopelessly-fridgeless-day-78/ (accessed 30 April 2010). Suitably Despairing, ‘37 Consequences of Going Green’, 26 November 2007, http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/2007/11/37-consequences-of-going- green.html (accessed 30 April 2010).
6 There are more similarities. Sustainable living experiments, such as breaching experiments, are not so much concerned with the testing of hypotheses, but rather use experiments as aids to ‘the sluggish imagination’ (Lynch, 1993). In this respect, one could argue that sustainable living experiments ‘ethno-methodologize’ ethnomethodology itself. While ethnomethodologists tended to reserve the capacity to ‘breach’ social life for themselves, in sustainable living experiments all sorts of social actors can be said to make this type of intervention.
7 These arguments about the multiple purposes served by experiments, notably developed in actor-network theory (ANT), also imply a particular understanding of the experiment as a site for the redistribution of research. In actor-network
Experiment: the experiment in living 91
theory’s account of the experiment, it figures as a location for the redistribution of theory formation, namely as a site where ontologies come about. Furthermore, ANT approaches the experiment as a site for building social support for science, suggesting that audiences and social actors play a more active role in the societal embedding of science than conventional theories of knowledge tend to recognize. My account of the experiment as a multifarious instrument draws on these arguments about the redistribution of the roles of research in experimental practice, even if I treat them separately in this chapter.
8 This is how the OED defines multifariousness: ‘what inappropriately or confusingly embraces two or more distinct matters’. One could argue that experiments have long been ascribed this feature in the sociology and philosophy of science. Thus, the philosopher of science Pierre Duhem (1906/1982) famously proposed that it is not always possible, in scientific experiments, to distinguish clearly between the empirical content of experimental hypotheses, and their theoretical framework. 9 Suitably Despairing, http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/ (accessed 30 April
2010).
10 Debates are ongoing about the implications of the rise of digital technologies such as search engines and blogging for knowledge cultures and the politics of knowledge: Who is allowed access to data? Who can scrutinize which methods are deployed? Who is allowed to modify those methods? However, these debates are mostly not conducted in the vocabulary of social research, but rather in the legal, moral and political languages of intellectual property rights and democracy (Kelty, 2008). The question in this regard is what social research may contribute to such debates. Here I am highlighting that it makes possible an alternative reading of the implications of digitization for research cultures: rather than saying that digitization enables either the privatization or the ‘democratization’ of social research – as in the slogan ‘we are all social researchers now’ – I am foregrounding the redistribution of social research capacities among specific actors.
11 This research was performed as part of the Digital Methods summer workshop in 2009, at the University of Amsterdam.
12 An ontology of multiplicity highlights that things are ‘more than one but less than many’, to use Mol’s (2002) phrase. It is often said that such multiple ontologies precisely do not display the neat divisions among separate entities, which comparative analysis seems to require (Strathern, 2004). It is one of the reasons why I characterize social research here as a way of rendering ontologies enacted in practice – i.e. to render them comparable involves an ‘arteficial’ intervention on the part of social research.
13 The endless but rather minimal variations on the theme of green tips on the Web is part of the reason why it can be called an ‘information format’ – or indeed an ‘action template’ – and it seems significant the two can be conflated in this instance. One can also think here of the drive to extract information about actors’ everyday activities through the collection and analysis of transactional or registrational data (Savage and Burrows, 2007; Rogers, 2009; Ruppert, 2009), with living experiments offering a publicity genre for actors to capture and publicize such data.
14 This network was located with the aid of Issue Crawler, a Web-based tool for network analysis developed by the govcom.org Foundation Amsterdam. We used active, English-language green living blogs as starting points. Issue Crawler crawls hyperlinks going out from these starting points, performs co-link analysis and demarcates a network on this basis (www.issuecrawler.net).
15 Frederiksplein Video, posted 22 May 2009 by Esther Polak, Spiral Drawing Sunrise, http://spiraldrawingsunrise.wordpress.com/ (accessed 30 April 2010). 16 Noortje Marres, ‘How long does a sunrise last’, posted 23 May 2009, http://
spiraldrawingsunrise.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/noortje-marres-log-2-2- during/#more-276 (accessed 30 April 2010).
92 Noortje Marres
17 The spiral seems a perfectly suitable form for performing geometry as movement: ‘the spiral is not so much a shape, as the evidence of a shape in formation’ (Aranda and Lasch, 2009) But in contrast to Aranda and Lash’s formal description of the spiral, an ethnomethodologist would emphasize the circumstantiality of method in ths case too. It then becomes noteworthy that Esther would help the winding process by moving the pole slightly, to make sure that the cart’s trajectory would pass over the sheets of paper, which we had taped to the ground to record the cart’s path. Such circumstantial interventions, we could argue, are here positively constitutive of the performance of method. In this regard, it should also be noted that Spiral Drawing Sunrise runs on an algorithm: one that stipulates the treshhold of stored energy at which the robot cart will start to move (until its battery is empty). Spiral Drawing Sunrise then demonstrates the cirumstantiality of this ‘recipe for action’ more specifically: it provides a indication of the range of entities that must come into play before the algorithm can ‘work’, that is, before it can assist in the rendering of a setting as a happening.
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