"We need more curiosity driven research" (c) Informationlab

The Issue of this week is IssueCrawler.

Luckily, the "fathers" of the IssueCrawler not only developed a software which enhances research of the WWW communities, but also made a great effort in answering the W-questions about the project itself. This post is an invitation to a step-by-step overview of the websites one would find informative and useful. So, let's start surfing.

Before you start clicking the links, I suggest you look through the Q&A I have compiled.

Who Are the "Fathers" of the Project?
The Govcom.org Foundation (based in Amsterdam) and its collaborators* (need more research on that).
*UPDATE:
Richard Rogers and the Govcom.org Foundation acknowledge support of 1. the Center for Arts and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany; 2. Crooked Line, with contributions by Creative Industries and Anderemedia, organizations all based in Amsterdam; 3. Govcom.org and Anderemedia, Sonologic (The Hague) provided the software, and 4. Noortje Marres furnished the issue as well as significant findings, 5. Marc Tuters produced the Issue Crawler exhibition ("The Places of Issues").

When was it developed?
So far, I cannot provide an exact answer. I wish I could interview Professor Rogers or his collaborators about it**. I can only say that the movie about the IssueCrawler was first shown: "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy," exhibition curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, March-October 2005.
**UPDATE:
Perfect. Professor Rogers published an extensive article about how the IssueCrawler project was launched and carried out. The article can be found on the website of The European Association of Science and Technology. I really recommend it.

What is the IssueCrawler?
It's a software tool that locates and visualizes networks on the Web.

What is special about the IssueCrawler?
It is used by NGOs and other researchers to answer questions about specific networks and effective networking more generally. You also may do in-depth research with the software.

What websites do you recommend to visit first?
Now that you have some idea what the IssueCrawler is about---I suggest you download the video here.

The Issue Crawler Back-End Movie is a demonstration of how the Issue Crawler works. The movie is also a narrative of a research project conducted with the Issue Crawler and allied tools. The movie focuses on the implications of global civil society's 'issue drift.' As global civil society and intergovernmental organizations move from issue to issue, from place to place and from forum to forum, the question is, do they remember what is happening on the ground?

The movie goes like this:

When you meet someone for the first time, they may ask you: Where are you from? Some people have a hard time answering that question. For example, someone may say, "I'm from all over the place." To avoid awkwardness, some people now ask a new question. "Where are you based?"

Issues have a similar awkwardness. The place where an issue is from may not be the place where the issue is now based. The issue may have drifted elsewhere -- to another global forum, for example.

Showing methods and mapping results, the Issue Crawler movie addresses the places of issues - where they are from, and where they are based. The most important question is whether the new base remembers where the issue is from.*

Now, after the movie, I suggest you visit The Govcom.org and read carefully the extended article on "Scenarios of use for NGOs and other researchers".
For the purpose of my research, the following chunk about mapping the Issue Network is the most useful:

2.3 Issue Network

Issue Network: This is the network of organizations around a particular issue, and the original purpose of the software. Who’s doing ‘conflict timber’? Who’s doing ‘communication rights’? What’s the network around an issue at this time? Besides organizations, the network may have key documents, events, products, tools, slogans and more that bind the network, or particular clusters in the network. You may explore these commonalities once you have located a network.

Method: Doing a key word search in Google and using all the top ten or twenty results is one way to start, but it is not wholly advisable, for Google’s returns rely on the ‘entire Web’, while we are interested in only parts of the Web – networks. See also pieces that touch on the Issue Crawler philosophy.

To begin locating an issue network, use a short list of URLs which, in your view, provide a good overview of the issue. To gather such a list, you could use Google or another search engine (collecting one or more of the returns), but you also could ask an ‘expert’, gather organization names or URLs from one or more decent newspaper articles, rely on a particular organization’s link list related to an issue, scrape URLs from a discussion list (archive), etc.

Type or paste URLs in the Issue Crawler, and harvest. The Issue Crawler’s default settings are for issue network location.

Crawler settings:
Privilege starting points (off).
analysis ‘by page’
iterations of method: 2
crawl depth: 2

If you want to go into DETAILS, have a look at the long FAQ here.

Okay, now it is clear to me as a day: I need a trainin in the theory and method of network location and issue mapping to carry out my project. Last year and several months ago, I contacted Professor Rogers concerning the possibility to pay a visit to his Department and attend his lecture at UvA. The answer was positive. So, right now I am sending out the letter to Professor in which I ask about the possibility to visit him in UvA in April or May.
I will keep on updating about my progress.

***URGENT UPDATE!
I have received a positive reply from Professor Rogers. I will be attending his lecture at UvA on 20th of April. This is unbelievable. It means so much to me.