Entering the Paleo Diet
The purpose of the coming segment is two fold. First to provide the reader with heuristic tools to explore the network of actors and institutions constituted around the Paleo Diet. But just as important it provides a very intimate look into our point of entry, revealing the limits of our maps and the analysis that have spawn from this original entry point. This point is made with respect to the diversity and the amount of actors that are involved in the Paleo issue. Bias and subjectivity are very relevant concepts in the mapping endeavor, but instead of hiding behind the excuse, we give the reader the opportunity to explore the questions: How exactly are we biased? How has our original vision influenced our further analysis?
We do not just provide you with tools to explore, but at the same time reflexions about how the heuristics and analytics guide us, highlighting somethings and hiding others. |
The main point is to illustrate how different samples and constructions of the Paleo Diet Controversy, mediated by our search strategies combined with the Google algorithms, can take you very different places. This is done by comparing how different guiding analytics point us in different directions in two hyperlink networks which we have chosen to call:
'The Google-Slave Network': Simulating what path Google provides you with very general queries concerning the Paleo Diet, doing snowball sampling from the top query results. 'The Generic Network': Here we take several steps away from the original entry point of Google, using the Issue-Crawler program to follow all hyperlinks from our original Network and repeating this crawl away from Google Network by three steps. |