  News website comment sections are spaces where potentially conflicting
opinions and beliefs are voiced. Addressing questions of how to study such
cultural and societal conflicts through technological means, the present
article critically examines possibilities and limitations of machine-guided
exploration and potential facilitation of on-line opinion dynamics. These
investigations are guided by a discussion of an experimental observatory for
mining and analyzing opinions from climate change-related user comments on news
articles from the TheGuardian.com. This observatory combines causal mapping
methods with computational text analysis in order to mine beliefs and visualize
opinion landscapes based on expressions of causation. By (1) introducing
digital methods and open infrastructures for data exploration and analysis and
(2) engaging in debates about the implications of such methods and
infrastructures, notably in terms of the leap from opinion observation to
debate facilitation, the article aims to make a practical and theoretical
contribution to the study of opinion dynamics and conflict in new media
environments.
