Brown Bag Seminar with research assistant Stine Hauberg Nielsen and associate professor Marie Louise Tørring from the Department of Anthropology, AU.

In this seminar, we present the Danish HPV vaccine related controversy and invite you to think about what kind of cross-fruition might be gained from expanding today’s ethnographic research practices in the field with controversy mapping online. Controversy mapping is a cross-disciplinary enterprise that currently brings together ethnography, media studies, data mining, information design and scientometrics to exploit the potentials of digital mediation and follow the various traces left by actors online. In today’s HPV controversy, opinion formers often blame “pseudo-scientific advice and rejection of facts” for the drastic decline in HPV vaccination coverage in Denmark over the last couple of years. Some even take the case as an example of how “post-factuality is threatening public health care”. We discuss the dreams of digital humanities; for instance the ability to study a discourse as it unfolds – and the capacity of maps to draw theoretical assumptions into doubt. And we ask your opinion: What epistemological pitfalls/side-effects/hurdles do you see coming when ethnography enters the digital space?