Invited speakers

Inaugural session – Richard Rogers

Director of the Digital Methods Initiative at University of Amsterdam will present how DMTs can be mobilized to explore social complexity and present a broad vision of the development of the tools now used in the cartography of information – both in research and and the private sector.

Prof. Richard Rogers is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or “recommender” cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations.

Mapping S&T through Structured Data – Jean-Philippe Cointet

Jean-Philippe is currently a researcher at INRA-SenS (Sciences en Société), he received his PhD from the Ecole Polytechnique in 2010 and was awarded the “Prix de these” for his dissertation “Social and Semantic dynamics in knowledge communities: morphogenesis and diffusion.” He continues to work on knowledge production and diffusion in various types of communities, including scientific communities, blogosphere communities, online forums, patent directories and the media sphere.

Cointet will give a presentation entitled “Scientometrics and beyond, investigating science dynamics with complex systems methods”. He will discuss various “complex system methods” which are used by practicioners when it comes to “mapping science & technology”. He will also illustrate how processing bibliometric datasets with the help of complex systems models could help us answer questions which are not traditionally addressed by scientometrics such as  the design of creative/efficient teams, the interplay between social & semantic dimensions in individual dynamics, or the existence of regular dynamical patterns in long-term scientific evolution.

To understand the dynamics of knowledge communities from their digital traces requires specifically designed tools to turn raw textual traces into actual heterogeneous knowledge networks. As a result, Cointet has also been one of the core contributors of a series of network and text analysis tools provided in an open online platform, CorTexT Manager. By processing textual data, the CorTexT Manager can also visualize evolving socio-semantic landscapes.

Digitized archives and distant reading – Claire Lemercier

Claire Lemercier est historienne. Elle est directrice de recherche au CNRS au Centre de Sociologie des Organisations de Sciences Po. Les recherches de Claire portent sur des institutions qui se situent aux frontières du public et du privé et participent à la régulation de l’économie. Elle s’attache en particulier à mettre au jour un modèle français de régulation fondé sur des articulations spécifiques entre public et privé. C’est d’ailleurs l’objet de son habilitation à diriger des recherches intitulée « Un modèle français de jugement des pairs » qui, à partir du cas des tribunaux de commerce et des conseils de prud’hommes au XIXe siècle, discute des particularités d’une justice officielle, mais rendue par des juges élus issus des entreprises.

Ses travaux actuels portent sur des périodes plus longues, sur les dirigeants des grandes entreprises françaises, l’arbitrage commercial international et la « dépersonnalisation » des relations de commerce. Parallèlement, elle mène différentes activités de vulgarisation des méthodes quantitatives  parmi lesquelles figure la publication en collaboration avec Claire Zalc d’un manuel intitulé « Méthodes quantitatives pour l’historien », publié dans la collection « Repères » en 2008 et participe à beaucoup d’évènements ayant traits aux humanités digitales et aux méthodes quali quantitatives.

Elle est également chargée de cours à Sciences Po et chargée de conférences à l’EHESS où elle anime un atelier dont la thématique est L’histoire et l’historien.ne face au quantitatif.

Natively digital mapping – Noortje Marres

Since 2011, Noortje has been a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmith University of London. Before that she was a Research Fellow in Science & Technology Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Marie Curie Fellow here in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. She studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and did her doctoral research at that same university and at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines, Paris. Noortje was part of the team that built the Issuecrawler, an online platform for the location and analysis of issue-networks, and is currently developing Issue Mapping Online. She convenes the MA/MSc Digital Sociology and is Director of the inter-disciplinary research centre CSISP(Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process).

Her work investigates various intersections between technology, environment, knowledge, and the public. Recently, she has been focusing on the role of devices, environments and things in the enactment of participation (in public life, innovation, research, change), paying particular attention to digital forms of social research and the development of methods and tools of controversy analysis and issue mapping. Her work bridges science and technology studies with political theory, most apparent in her scholarly articles on issues of democracy in technological societies, and (neo-)pragmatist contributions to our understanding of these issues through concepts of material participation and public experiments.

Transformative interactions: web effects on social dynamics – David Chavalarias

Permanent CNRS researcher at the CAMS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes, CNRS) and director of the Paris IdF Complex System Institute (http://iscpif.fr). David Chavalarias has a background in Mathematics and Computer sciences (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan & Agregation de Mathématiques) and a PhD in Cognitive Sciences (Ecole Polytechnique) with a specialization in social systems modeling. His researches concern quantitative epistemology, social dynamics reconstruction and cultural evolution modelling.

He particularly focuses his work on the problem of endogenous preferences and social network formation, developing a new framework based on complex systems, multi-agents modelling and mathematical analysis. These researches have various applications in social sciences in fields like economy, collective discovery, emergence of cooperation, and cultural evolution.