Europe and North America Regional GCED Network

We adopted a whole network design, as it allows for the determination of both
local and global social network properties (Butts, 2008, p.18).
We used as network representation an adjacency matrix (n x n) where there is a
1 when there is a link reported and 0 otherwise.
4) Digital Methods
To complement the social network analysis conducted via structured interviews,
we also draw on digital methods in order to identify networks of connections
in the public sphere both among our list of organizations and beyond them,
including connections that the interviewees may not recognize. By drawing on
digital data sources for social network analysis, we acknowledge the increasing
digitization of the social world, including the digital structuring of information
sharing and networked connections.
Further, links embedded in digital data sources such as institutional websites
and social media enable us to empirically observe the GCED network across
geographic regions and involving multiple types of actors, such as NGOs,
governments, researchers, and others who all interact online. In this way, we can
attain a view of how the GCED actors interact with one another "in the wild" of
the digital sphere, even as we learn of their interactions through interviews with
organizational representatives.
Our research draws on digital methods as social and political research (Marres,
2015; Rogers, 2014) to map the actors and GCED discourses associated around
the same actors interviewed using a structured survey. For digital methods, the
digital is the social (Rogers, 2014). In mapping social actors, digital methods
assume the digitization of society, whereby digital technology is "affecting most
if not all areas of social life, and is itself generative of new social practices, ties,
and relations" (Marres, 2015, p. 25). Due to the increasing digitization of society,
"electronic interactions have become so pervasive that they can no longer be
conceived as a separate social space. No longer limited to a specific sector,
digital interactions are now woven throughout the fabric of collective existence"
(Venturini, 2012). In the case of GCED actors, it is key to recognize how digital
technologies are not only reflective but also "generative of new social practices,
ties, and relations" (Marres, 2015, p. 25), as actors interact in the virtual sphere.
Rather than relegating digital data to a digital realm, digital methods take
advantage of the "accessibility, aggregability, and traceability of the statements
and literature as well as their connection to actors and of actors to each other"
(Rogers, Sánchez-Querubín, & Kil, 2015, p. 44), which can be visualized for
social research. Digital methods repurpose digitally native objects, such as
hyperlinks, URLs, and hashtags for social science research. By tracing the digital
associations among the GCED actors, it is possible to see the contestations
and alliances that form and which discourses dominate. Such patterns can be
identified through digital traces such as inlinks and outlinks on websites, follower
Europe and North America Regional GCED Network