Franck Rebillard, Professeur Université Paris 3

Franck Rebillard Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Présentation au Social Media Club Quelle valorisation des social data ? – Mardi 15 mai 2012

Le recours aux digital methods

dans l’analyse de l’information en ligne.

Apports et limites.

« A series of volumes and handbooks has now appeared where the

researchers continue to develop quite a classic social scientific

armature, which includes interviews, surveys, observation, and others.

What I would like to point out in particular is these could be categorized

or conceptualized as digitized methods. That is, taking methods —

existing methods— and trying to move them online. » (p. 242)

« What I’d like to try to do —and I think that many of us, in a sense, are

doing this already— is introduce a new era in Internet-related

research where we no longer need to go off-line, or to digitize

method, in order to study the online. Rather, in studying the online,

we make and ground findings about society and culture with the

Internet. Thus, the Internet is a research site where one can

ground findings about reality. With this particular idea, I have

introduced the term digital groundedness, or online

groundedness, where claims about society are grounded in the

online. » (p. 243) ROGERS R., 2010, « Internet Research : The Question of Method », Journal of Information

Technology and Politics, 7 (2/3), pp. 241-260, [http://www.digitalmethods.net/]

Mise en contexte

Digitized Methods / Digital Methods (Rogers, 2010)

http://www.digitalmethods.net/

•« The Meme-tracker technology (http://memetracker.org), [...] analyzes

1.6 million articles and posts each day from a mix of mainstream news

sites, new media sites and blogs. The Meme-tracker algorithm operates

by extracting all quotations that appear in these sources. [...] it then

finds any variants of the original quote that convey the same idea, as

well as similar ideas or phrases that may have come from other people

or been delivered at other times. These elements -- the original quote

and its variants -- are clustered into a “meme” or a concept. »

The Dynamics of the News Cycle

(Leskovec et al., 2009)

Exemple d’application à l’information en ligne (1)

The Dynamics of the News Cycle

(Leskovec et al., 2009 / Graphique extrait du site

http://memetracker.org/ )


•« Twitter provides a Search API for extracting tweets containing

particular keywords. To obtain the dataset of trends for this study,

we repeatedly used the API in two stages. First, we collected the

trending topics by doing an API query every 20 minutes. Second,

for each trending topic, we used the Search API to collect all the

tweets mentioning this topic over the past 20 minutes. For each

tweet, we collected the author, the text of the tweet and the time it

was posted. Using this procedure for data collection, we obtained

16.32 million tweets on 3361 different topics over a course of 40

days in Sep-Oct 2010. »

Trends in Social Media

(Asur et al., 2011)


Trends in Social Media (Asur et al., 2011, p. 10)


La « nouvelle frontière »

de la « nouvelle science des réseaux »

« Indeed, the sudden emergence of large and reliable network

maps drove the development of network theory during the past

decade. If data of similar detail capturing the dynamics of

processes taking place on networks were to emerge in the

coming years, our imagination will be the only limitation to

progress.

If I dare to make a prediction for the next decade, it is this:

Thanks to the proliferation of the many electronic devices that we

use on a daily basis, from cell phones to Global Positioning

Systems and the Internet, that capture everything from our

communications to our whereabouts, the complex system that

we are most likely to tackle first in a truly quantitative fashion

may not be the cell or the Internet but rather society itself. »

(Barabasi, 2009).

Re-mise en contexte

Composer avec la « nouvelle science des réseaux »

Profiter des apports des digital methods :

-Corpus numériques de grande envergure, quasi-exhaustifs

-Topologie de l’internet et visualisation graphique

-Traitements automatisés sur de vastes jeux de données

Utiliser ce premier balisage pour ensuite :

-Procéder à des analyses qualitatives de contenu

-Observer les acteurs et leurs pratiques communicationnelles

Conclusion