Governing by evidence is only rendered possible if this governing relies on concrete instruments, such as, in the scope of this contribution, websites. These instruments are no passive hatchways of information dispersal. Rather, they are active platforms that perform particular operations which have to be analyzed on their own terms (e.g. Decuypere, Ceulemans & Simons 2013; Latour et al. 2012; Venturini 2012). The knowledge portrayed on a website, for instance, is transferred to interested users by means of communicative techniques (e.g. tabs, links, etc.) in such a way as to be clear and appropriate for the user. In order to trace these agential effects, a detailed and careful study of micro-operations is needed that unfolds how precisely each website acts as a device. Building on socio-technical approaches such as actor-network theory, we have divided these operations into five different sorts that also acted as the focal points of attention of our analysis. First, how is knowledge being portrayed on the EU-Education and Training website? Second, on which aspects are school systems, students, teachers and teacher educators being made comparable? This point of attention is informed by the contention that in order for school systems to be compared, schools first of all need to be objectified as entities of which it is possible to compare certain characteristics. Third, how is the inscribed information regarding these comparisons made meaningful as forms of valid knowledge, i.e. which processes make it possible to make sense of these inscriptions and objectifications? Fourth, on the basis of which mechanism does this portrayed knowledge gain legitimacy? That is to say, which kind of authority is installed precisely in and through these inscriptions (cf. Latour 1987)? Fifth, which types of activities are made possible by all of this, that is to say, which kind of user is called into being by means of all these operations? In this sense, and in line with Davies (2008), the applied methodology is an auto-ethnographical approach. That is, we (as researchers) positioned ourselves as potential visitors of each website and sought to make explicit the various ways in which potential visitors of each website are addressed, and how and when information turns into knowledge (for us) and how schools, students, teachers and teacher educators are portrayed (to us).

To give an adequate account of these stagings and operations, the results of our analysis are presented in terms of descriptions of what each website does and makes its visitors do (and understand themselves) on each particular subsection (mostly in the forms of different tabs the visitor can click upon). As such, we bring the technical operations as well as the social operations of the Education and Training website performs to the fore. These will be presented by means of the forms of inscription used, the spaces of equivalence that are opened up, the sort of sense making that is enabled, the type of authority that is installed and finally, the space of action that takes shape in front of the users of the website. By displaying the socio-technical operations and showing the enacted modes of existence for students, teachers, schools and teacher educators, we aim to open up a space where they can be put side by side and, possibly, re-composed. In that sense, we seek to offer an entry point to question the claim that evidence would ‘speak for itself’.