Research directions
Digital traces
My research focuses on the epistemological, social and political issues involved in renewing the conditions of access to knowledge of individual and collective practices.
More specifically, a search is carried out on the history of Wikipedia's page views in the ten most important languages in order to better identify the differences between Wikipedia editions, but also to automatically identify global places and events.
Social and Political Issues of The Internet
My research focuses on collaboration (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, collective intelligence...), Internet governance (algorithms, net neutrality...) and more generally on the renewal of social mediations.
Textual analysis
My research also focuses on textual analysis. This exploratory approach focuses on the publications of the last ten years of eight American and English scientific journals (with the highest impact factor) in order to identify trends in the standardization of themes and references mobilized.
Other research includes the treatment of the Internet by the media (major anglophone media on the subject) or scientific communications (Calenda). Another research project concerns the automatic identification of research themes in the laboratories of the EPFL's ENAC faculty.
Big Data, Social Sciences and Society
The abundance of data significantly renews the practical conditions for scientific research. The massive production of data on individual practices is a remarkable opportunity to better understand contemporary social dynamics. Computer science and physics thus tend to increasingly integrate social issues into their research problems, neglecting all too often the specificities of this type of data and the plurality of contexts in which they are produced. My focus is on the resurgence of the assumptions of nineteenth-century sociology (positiveism, social physics and the laws of imitation), as well as cybernetics and behaviorism.
Data visualization
My research focuses on visualization issues in the social sciences. The powerful renewal of the technical capacities of information processing is changing not only the means of visualizing data, but also the actors who produce such images. My attention is not only focused on the inclusion of these new productions in a broader perspective of visual culture, but also on the potentialities and limitations of this dynamic.
