It is increasingly common in natural and social sciences to rely on network visualizations to explore relational datasets and illustrate findings. Such practices have been around long enough to prove that scholars find it useful to project networks in a two-dimensional space and to use their visual qualities as proxies for their topological features. Yet these practices remain based on intuition, and the foundations and limits of this type of exploration are still implicit. To fill this lack of formalization, this (...) paper offers explicit documentation for the kind of visual network analysis encouraged by force-directed layouts. Using the example of a network of Jazz performers, band and record labels extracted from Wikipedia, the paper provides guidelines on how to make networks readable and how to interpret their visual features. It discusses how the inherent ambiguity of network visualizations can be exploited for exploratory data analysis. Acknowledging that vagueness is a feature of many relational datasets in the humanities and social sciences, the paper contends that visual ambiguity, if properly interpreted, can be an asset for the analysis. Finally, we propose two attempts to distinguish the ambiguity inherited from the represented phenomenon from the distortions coming from fitting a multidimensional object in a two-dimensional space. We discuss why these attempts are only partially successful, and we propose further steps towards a metric of spatialization quality. (shrink)

This article proposes an original analysis of the international debate on climate change through the use of digital methods. Its originality is twofold. First, it examines a corpus of reports covering 18 years of international climate negotiations, a dataset never explored before through digital techniques. This corpus is particularly interesting because it provides the most consistent and detailed reporting of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to (...) text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. Through this mixed approach, we tried to obtain relevant findings without imposing them on our corpus. The originality of our corpus and of our approach encouraged us to question some of the habits of digital research and confront three common misunderstandings about digital methods that we discuss in the first part of the article. In addition to reflecting on methodology, however, we also wanted to offer some substantial contribution to the understanding of UN-framed climate diplomacy. In the second part of the article we will therefore introduce some of the preliminary results of our analysis. By discussing three visualizations, we will analyze the thematic articulation of the climatic negotiations, the rise and fall of these themes over time and the visibility of different countries in the debate. (shrink)

In this article, we present a few lessons we learnt in the establishment of the Sciences Po médialab. As an interdisciplinary laboratory associating social scientists, code developers and information designers, the médialab is not one of a kind. In the last years, several of such initiatives have been established around the world to harness the potential of digital technologies for the study of collective life. If we narrate this particular story, it is because, having lived it from the inside, we (...) can provide an intimate account of the surprises and displacements of digital research. Founding the médialab in 2009, we knew that we were leaving the reassuring traditions of social sciences to venture in the unexplored territory of digital inscriptions. What we couldn't foresee was how much such encounter would change our research. Buying into gospel of Big Data, we imagined that the main novelty of digital research came from handling larger amounts of data. We soon realized that the interest of digital inscriptions comes instead from their proliferating diversity. Such diversity encouraged us to reshape our professional alliances, research practices and theoretical perspectives. It also led us to overcome several of the oppositions that used to characterize social sciences and to move in the direction of a more continuous sociology. (shrink)

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the (...) articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric solar radiation management rather than land-based carbon dioxide removal type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for solar radiation management type technologies more than for land-based carbon dioxide removal ones. The article also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualising tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the article contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a technology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe financial crisis of 2008 was unforeseen partly because the academic theories that underpin policy making do not sufficiently account for uncertainty and complexity or learned and evolved human capabilities for managing them. Mainstream theories of decision making tend to be strongly normative and based on wishfully unrealistic “idealized” modeling. In order to develop theories of actual decision making under uncertainty, we need new methodologies that account for how human actors often manage uncertain situations “well enough.” Some possibly helpful methodologies, (...) drawing on digital science, focus on the role of emotions in determining people's choices; others examine how people construct narratives that enable them to act; still others combine qualitative with quantitative data. (shrink)

Reviving the somewhat forgotten notion of ‘secondary orality’, this paper conceptualizes online conspiracism as a creative, if monstrous, response to the attention economy of social media. Combining classic literature on oral cultures and current research on online subcultures, this paper takes conspiratorial folklore seriously and develops a program of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.