Atomizing the discourse
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 2. Juli 2010, 11:18 o'clock
The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog is introducing the project Debategraph today. Debategraph describes itself like this:
Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.
ItâEUR(TM)s a little bit sad and more over dangerous for political discourse and open debate to see âEURoecomplex, multi-dimensional problemsâEUR as you describe it broken down into a small set of prejudices (as in the case of âEURoeIllegalâEUR Migration to the USA). ThatâEUR(TM)s a problem which I found underestimated in general with Open Data. Data appear to be facts, because the contexts of them are blackboxed either in a machine like in Nature Sciences or in Methods like in Humanities and so on. In this sense Data always is somehow affirmative. They have a message which is alwas the message of its creator. There are many situations in which this is not problematically but when it comes to political discourse it is, as seen in the example above. The question why someone raises an argument, who raises it, in which situation, with which interests is a generic part of political debates which canâEUR(TM)t be represented in the approach of Debategraph.