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Chapter 238on the type and number of connections between them. Clustering them by similarity in content and digital affordances like hashtags or hyperlinks rendering is a common way to create maps for illustrating these images’ circulation across platforms (Pearce et al., 2020; Venturini, 2010; Venturini, Jacomy, et al., 2018).2.4 MethodsTo answer our research questions, we used academic literature and policy documents from the three countries to gain a contextual understanding of the controversies. In addition, we scraped text and visuals from the Google top-ranked URLs5 in the web spheres of the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Mexico on 10 July 2018 and 19 December 2019.6Our research protocol contained five steps: 1) mapping the actors and coalitions in the three-country web spheres involved in the shale gas controversy; 2) tagging the actors as a proponent, opponent, or neutral through a content analysis of their URLs; 3) running a visual network analysis by scraping the visuals each actor use to depict their point, determining how these actors frame shale gas exploration, and what kind of visuals clusters are used to illustrate these framings on the debate; 4) contextualising the visuals characteristics between proponents, opponents and neutral actors across these web spheres’ local situation; 5) relating the findings to the context specifics of the controversies in each country.Following Latour’s concept of programme and anti-programme as opposite agendas in a controversy (Akrich, 1997; Latour, 1990, 2005), in the first step we chose keywords that represented different sides on the shale gas exploration controversy. As proposed by Rogers (2017, 2019), the term ‘programme’ refers to claims and efforts promoting a particular proposal campaign or project. Conversely, the ‘anti-programme’ opposes these efforts or projects. A third position 5 Google has different national domains (country-based versions). Top-ranked URLs are the top search engine results for three queries in distinct languages and distinct national domains of Google web search engine. Details on the researched domains and queries are given further in this section. For discussions and examples of national domains of Google’s relevance for digital research, see Ben-David et al. (2018); Rogers (2013).6 On 10 July 2018, during the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School at the University of Amsterdam, the team made the first data collection and decided to follow-up with a second time period to add a comparative analysis, after noticing shifting perspectives in the news and grey literature (e.g., El Universal, 2018; Loredo, 2018; Reforma, 2018) by the end of 2019. This comparison could offer insights about the topic and allow us to ‘ground’ the results seen in local context changes. The day of December 19th was random.Efrat.indd 38 19-09-2023 09:47