Rethinking Kelly and Etling’s Map of the Iranian Blogosphere Gwyneth Sutherlin, Doctoral Researcher University of Bradford, UK Using Open Data: Policy Modelling, Citizen Empowerment, Data Journalism Brussels, 19 May 2012 A few guiding questions What are the limitations of open data for IR policy? What is the macro framework which informs the approach to mining open data for social science? What is a valid framework when working with global communications data? How can culture be incorporated as a variable? Introduction Kelly and Etling of Harvard’s Berkman Institute conducted a three-part series for the Internet and Democracy project mapping online environments in regions of strategic importance to American policy-makers which led to a further research initiative with the United States Institute for Peace called Blogs and Bullets. This paper takes a closer look at Mapping Iran’s Online Public (2008) because it is a good exemplar of the prevailing methodology in both the series and in the field of open data use for policy making. The original study analyzed open data in the form of blog URLs and associated links. In the first stage, the sites were visualized using a Fruchterman-Rheingold ‘physics model’ algorithm. The resulting clusters, called poles, were named and described through a text-mining filter designed by selecting 1700 terms “of interest” from en.wikipedia.org which also had an associated Farsi translation. (Kelly and Etling, 2008, p.15) Several native-level Farsi speakers reviewed hundreds of blogs by hand and coded for topics and information about authors. Finally, some associated links, such as YouTube videos, were considered as outlink analysis which looked at density of links connecting to other information sources to form a larger online ecology while still adhering to the network visualization model of nodes, poles, and links. The foundation of the map, what Kelly and Etling call the ‘macro structure’ of their analyses hinges on social science research about American behavior toward information and social group formation which they assert can be extended to other cultures and to the activity of blogging. (2008, p.8) In both of these regards, they overreach. Following from the flawed macro structure, their methodology produces an invalid modeling of Iranian online politics. This paper proposes a critique and a few tentative suggestions which highlight the value of culture as a variable in analyzing communication data. Universal Limitations Kelly and Etling (2008, p.6) claim that: Unique as a snowflake, the network structure of a society’s blogosphere will reflect salient features of the society’s culture, politics, and history. A society’s online communities of interest, social factions, and major preoccupations can be seen and measured, their words read and analyzed through a combination of structural and statistical analysis and textual interpretation. And they further assert that: Understanding the map is the key to understanding the Iranian blogosphere. (p.7) If this network is unique, then why underpin the analysis with a macro structure hybridized from two social science theories that assert all humans, regardless of cultural background, behave similarly? Put more simply, proposing that the system has universal and predictable qualities and is also a unique snowflake is a difficult model to build. Analysis of data filtered through an online platform, such as a blog, frequently ignores the invisible variable of cultural translation or