Description
This research question is aimed at mapping the actors taking part into the controversy debate. According to Venturini’s studies on controversies, the “actors” are all the active entities whose behaviour directly affect the debate.
Mapping the actors is useful to define what is part of the debate and what is contextual, which means that does not affect the controversy nor is affected. The actors coming out of the research are the following: Activists, Movements, and Publishers.
The activists have been described through biographical events that are related to Open Culture; it is possible to unveil details hovering the icon or the date surrounding the picture. Movements too have been described through relevant events or people that are related to Open Culture, such as foundation or trials. Publishers are displayed in two different visualizations. The former shows the geographical area each publisher belongs to; the latter shows a cluster bubble graph spotting the different kind of publishers: the free ones (in green), the paid publishers (in red), and the few mixed solutions (orange and yellow gradients). The bubbles of both the visualization are sized depending on the website’s Alexa ranking.
Since the nature of the actors is different - some are people, some are organizations - we clustered them within their own categories. Activists and movements have been labeled by lawfullness of their activities, whereas publishers have been ranked by geographical distribution, index of popularity (Alexa.com ranking), type of access to their contents.
Among the actors, the activists are generally high-educated people. It is remarkable the distinction in two groups: the group of researchers and professors, who are mid-aged, and act in a legal way, and the group of illegal activities, carried out by young web developing students. The publishers’ access costs show the essence of the controversy: two big groups (free and paid) based on opposite business models, which implies differences in access to knowledge and the consequential debate.
