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Patterns of Type and Content in an Online Policy Controversy372Studies about sustainability controversies have proposed digital methods for mapping online public debates and the many objects – visuals included – that are used in debates about controversial issues on digital platforms (Marres & Moats, 2015; Marres & Weltevrede, 2013; Metze, 2018b; Pearce et al., 2019, 2020; Rogers, 2013, 2015, 2019). Digital methods consist of ‘the deployment of online tools and data for the purposes of social and medium (Rogers, 2019, p. 21). They can be used to study society with the web as a medium. It acknowledges the internet and social media platforms not only as a source of ephemeral information, but also as a non-human actor itself in the dynamics of social practices and decision-making (Marres & Moats, 2015; Marres & Weltevrede, 2013; Rogers, 2013, 2015).Digital methods usually focus on an object or on a combination of them, such as a ‘digitalised object’ (e.g., text, images, profiles) or ‘natively digital objects’ (e.g., hashtags and URLs) (Rogers, 2013). As methodology, they help track how these objects or topics combine, travel, collapse and are repurposed online (Omena, 2019; Rogers, 2019). The analysis of digital objects can be conducted using open web content, such as links and web pages. Usually, from this data, we build lexical maps, source actors lists and perform visual analyses of the topic (Rogers, 2019).These authors also acknowledge that, when mapping online controversies, the visuals, metaphor, issue, or any other digital or digitalised object can be central. Additionally, understanding the online debate by grounding it in its context is pivotal. The controversy will not be the same in one place as the other. In addition, we need to take into account actors and standpoints in the debate: to who is this topic controversial and what positions are defended by debaters? (Marres, 2015; Marres & Moats, 2015; Marres & Weltevrede, 2013; Rogers, 2015, 2019).Building upon studies that used the digital methods approach to discuss phenomena of online public debates in different topics (Marres & Moats, 2015; Marres & Weltevrede, 2013; Metze, 2018b; Pearce et al., 2019, 2020; Rogers, 2013, 2015, 2019), for the shale case study, we focused on the visuals embedded on the URL’s content, acknowledging them to be entities acting in the debate. Understanding these images as a networked artefact (Niederer, 2018), we conducted a visual network analysis, in which we read visual properties (what is in the image) and the network’s spatial configuration (clustering of similar type of visualisations). In doing so, clusters of elements (here images) emerge based Efrat.indd 37 19-09-2023 09:47