Page 63 - Demo

Visual and Textual Storylines by Coalitions in a Policy Controversy613(Andreasson, 2018). Hence, webpages from this range of internet regions gave us (a) a broad variety in discourse coalitions and (b) diversity in the visualizations used by actors. Webpages are an ideal data source for collecting visualizations in their discursive context as they very often consist of both text and visuals.3.3.1 Data gatheringTwo different search strategies were applied to ensure a comprehensive actor list composed of traditional political actors and digital actors. First, an actor analysis was conducted based on descriptions of the evolution of the controversy in academic papers (Andreasson, 2018; Bomberg, 2017a; Cuppen, Pesch, et al., 2016; Dodge & Lee, 2017; Finkeldey, 2018; Metze, 2017). Second, a range of digital methods and tools was used (Rogers, 2013).14 These two strategies resulted in a list of 98 actors. We then used Google to locate each actor’s website (URL).From the list of websites, we identified webpages with text and visuals that their topic is hydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction,15 and we downloaded these webpages.16 A total of 96 webpages and 205 visualizations on these websites were collected.3.3.2 Data analysisThe downloaded in-text visualizations were coded in Atlas.ti software, that enables qualitative data analysis of both text and visual content. We first identified frames based on the text. Frames were coded deductively based on existing frame analyses of the shale gas controversy. We also identified themes in previous studies that have the potential to evolve into frames (candidate frames). Candidate frames that reflected ‘repeated patterns of meaning’ (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 86)were defined as frames.17 An analysis was conducted of the discursive storylines composed of collections of frames. Actors with a similar discursive storyline form a discourse coalition.14 We used the digital snowballing technique (Rogers, 2013, p. 23) to find internet actors. We used Google scraper with the keywords ‘shale gas’, ‘hydraulic fracturing’, and ‘fracking’ (search terms based on previous studies, see Finkeldey, 2018; Hopke & Simis, 2017; Stoutenborough et al., 2016) to identify the top-ranked URLs discussing shale gas in each internet region according to Google PageRank metrics. These page-rank metrics indicate the most popular online voices. We extracted actors’ names (manually and with the help of Aylien Text Analysis API tool) from the results.15 We used the menu of the website, and when that did not lead to any results we used Google search within a domain with the same keywords that were used to identify actors.16 We excluded advertisements and other unrelated content on the websites.17 Frame codes were: Bridge fuel or cleaner energy source (Bomberg, 2017a; Metze, 2017), David v Goliath (Bomberg, 2017a), Delay transition to sustainable energy (Metze, 2017), Drop in the ocean (Metze, 2017), Economic opportunity (Bomberg, 2017a; Dodge & Lee, 2017), Environmental/health risks (Bomberg, 2017a; Dodge & Lee, 2017; Metze, 2017), Geopolitics (Bomberg, 2017a; Cuppen, Pesch, et al., 2016; Dodge & Lee, 2017), Known risks (Weible et al., 2016), Landowner rights (Dodge, 2015; Dodge & Lee, 2017), Technique is safe and nothing new (Metze, 2017), Water scarcity (Andreasson, 2018; Atkinson, 2018).Efrat.indd 61 19-09-2023 09:47