Citizen Facts Project

Where most initiatives to combat disinformation are limited to denouncing fake news – with the risk of perpetuating an image of citizens as passive and gullible – Citizen Facts relies on collective intelligence. To counter disinformation, but also to promote media education and clean up public debate, Citizen Facts aims to give new impetus to investigative journalism, by combining it with the potential for participation offered by digital technologies.

Read the project presentation

UnMISSeD project

Funded by the European Media and Information Fund of the Gulbenkian Foundation, UnMiSSeD investigates the interaction between science and misinformation. Through a quali-quantitative approach, we examine questions such as: Does scientific information establish a common evidence base for societal debate? Does scientific information lead to convergence or to divergence of opinions? We combine the investigation of a large dataset of tweets around COVID-19 with a “close reading” of how these discussions permeate the porous boundaries of social media.

Read the project presentation

Quali-Quantitative (or non-binary) Methods

Venturini, T. (2024). “Quali-Quantitative (or non-binary) Methods”. In A. Irwin & U. Felt (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies (forthcoming).

In this entry for the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies, I discuss quali-quantitative methods as research techniques do not comply with the norms and expectations of both qualitative and quantitative research. This definition is deliberately vague and emphatically negative. Indeed, a more precise name for these techniques would be “neither-quali-nor-quantitative methods” or “non-binary methods” since this approach is less interested in combining the best of the qualitative and quantitative world than in breaking free from the constraints of both.

Read the pre-print version

PathOS project

Funded by the EU program WIDERA, PathOS intends to identify and document the multiple ways in which Open Science impact society, including the causal mechanisms linking Open Science policies to their political and societal outcomes and the existing enabling or blocking factors. Impact pathways respond to the need not only to estimate and measure net effects of a policy intervention, but to provide explanations why and how impacts occur. PathOS brings an interdisciplinary team of Open Science experts, infrastructure developers/operators, bibliometrics/scientometrics, data scientists, NLP/ML experts, sociologists, experts in socio-economic impact assessment and policy experts.

See the website project

Memecry: Tracing the Repetition-with-Variation of Formulas on 4chan/pol/

Hagen, S., & Venturini, T. (2023). Memecry: Tracing the Repetition-with-Variation of Formulas on 4chan/pol/. Social Science Research Network, 1–31.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of ‘memecry’ to conceptualise the dynamics of repetition-with-variation of Internet memes. We propose a large-scale operationalisation using 341 million posts made since 2014 on /pol/, the far-right politics subforum of the imageboard 4chan. We draw from literature on primary and secondary orality to relate memecry to the dynamics of online subcultures and to operationalise its study through formulas: mnemonic phrases encapsulating important elements of oral cultures, which have arguably regained prominence in ephemeral online environments like 4chan.

Read the paper in the Social Science Research Network (open access)

Online Conspiracy Theories, Digital Platforms and Secondary Orality. Toward a Sociology of Online Monsters

Venturini, T. (2022). Online Conspiracy Theories, Digital Platforms and Secondary Orality: Toward a Sociology of Online Monsters. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(5), 61–80. 10.1177/02632764211070962

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 programme of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.

Read the preprint version

Controversy Mapping. A Field Guide

Out in October, 2021 my book on controversy mapping authored with Anders Munk

Controversy Mapping is the first book to introduce readers to the observation and representation of contested issues on digital media. Drawing on actor-network theory and digital methods, Venturini and Munk outline the conceptual underpinnings and the many tools and techniques of controversy mapping. They review its history in science and technology studies, discuss its methodological potential, and unfold its political implications. Through a range of cases and examples, they demonstrate how to chart actors and issues using digital fieldwork and computational techniques. A preface by Richard Rogers and an interview with Bruno Latour are also included.

Take a peek at the table of contents

See the slides of the presentation

Data Inquiries

I am thrilled to announce the publication of the website of the new Data Inquiries initiative, which I wish to develop with the other members of the Public Data Lab.

Data Inquiries proposes a new way to do computational social science and to teach data literacy. It suggests, in particular, to shift the attention away from data and technologies and to the social and political implications of data science.

Data Inquiries draw attention to the social life of data both conceptually and practically:

Conceptually, it proposes to connect the practice and teaching of data science to the transdisciplinary literature on critical data studies and its description of the implicit assumptions and side effects of data infrastructures.

Practically, it suggests experimenting and teaching data science not in abstract challenges, but in actual social situations, that is in collaboration with civil society groups using data in their projects.

Discover Data Inquiries

Introducing Bibliograph

Developed with the support of the Mission pour les initiatives transverses et interdisciplinaires du CNRS, Bibliograph allows you turn a corpus of scientometrics records from ISI Web of Science or Scopus into a landscape of bibliographic coupling. Such a landscape consists in:

1. A base map network of references co-occurring in the records of the corpus – weighted by the frequency of their co-occurrence;

2. A layer of metadata extracted from the records (e.g. authors, subject areas, keywords) and positioned in the graph according to their co-occurrence with the references of the base map.

Try out the tool

Access to the open-source code

See the slides of a presentation of the tool

 

A network view on reliability: using machine learning to understand how we assess news websites

Blanke T. and Venturini T. (2021) A network view on reliability: using machine learning to understand how we assess news websites. Journal of Computational Social Science. DOI: 10.1007/s42001-021-00116-w.i

This article shows how a machine can employ a network view to reason about complex social relations of news reliability. Such a network view promises a topic-agnostic perspective that can be a useful hint on reliability trends and their heterogeneous assumptions. In our analysis, we depart from the ever-growing numbers of papers trying to find machine learning algorithms to predict the reliability of news and focus instead on using machine reasoning to understand the structure of news networks by comparing it with our human judgements. Understanding and representing news networks is not easy, not only because they can be extremely vast but also because they are shaped by several overlapping network dynamics. We present a machine learning approach to analyse what constitutes reliable news from the view of a network. Our aim is to machine-read a network’s understanding of news reliability. To analyse real-life news sites, we used the Décodex dataset to train machine learning models from the structure of the underlying network. We then employ the models to draw conclusions how the Décodex evaluators came to assess the reliability of news..

Download the open access final version of the paper

Similarity Sampling by Machine Learning

A Social Science Experiment with Artificial Intelligence and IPCC Leadership
By Tommaso Venturini, Tobias Blanke and Kari De Pryck

In this paper we devise a machine learning protocol to tackle a complex sociological task: extending a sample of organisational leaders starting from a list of individuals nominated for the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The difficulty in this task lies in the impossibility to spell out explicitly the characteristics that define leadership in a complex, highly distributed and political organisation. To bypass this lack of explicit definition, we use a series of techniques for anomaly detection to identify, among IPCC contributors, those with profiles similar to the official Bureau nominees. We found that we can build a model capable of a surprisingly accurate reading of IPCC leadership despite the social and political complexity of this organisation, and that we can usefully use that model to extend our initial sample.

Read the preprint

Bridging in Network Organisations the Case of International Panel on Climate Change

Bridging in Network Organisations the Case of International Panel on Climate Change
by Tommaso Venturini, Kari De Pryck and Robert Ackland

In this paper, we investigated the relational architecture of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focussing on the individuals that, in the thirty years of existence of the IPCC, have assured the connection between the different temporal, thematic and functional divisions of the organisation. To identify these bridge individuals, we proposed a new measure of bipartite bridgeness defined as the summation of the inverse Jaccard similarity coefficient of the neighbourhoods of all pairs of divisions to which an individual has participated. As we illustrated using an original database of the eight thousand individuals who contributed to the IPCC since its foundation, this measure of bipartite bridgeness is more informative than the simple degree, as it takes into account the importance and the rareness of the connections assured by each bridge.

Read the preprint

Junk News Bubbles Modelling the Rise and Fall of Attention in Online Arenas

In this paper, we present a type of media disorder which we call “junk news bubbles” and which derives from the effort invested by online platforms and their users to identify and share contents with rising popularity. Such emphasis on trending matters, we claim, can have two detrimental effects on public debates: first, it shortens the amount of time available to discuss each matter; second it increases the ephemeral concentration of media attention. We provide a formal description of the dynamic of junk news bubbles, through a mathematical exploration the famous “public arenas model” developed by Hilgartner and Bosk in 1988. Our objective is to describe the dynamics of the junk news bubbles as precisely as possible to facilitate its further investigation with empirical data.

Castaldo M, Venturini T, Frasca P, et al. (2021) Junk News Bubbles: Modelling the Rise and Fall of Attention in Online Arenas. New Media & Society (forthcoming). DOI: 10.1177/1461444820978640

Read the article online

We Only Have 12 Years: YouTube and the IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5C

This article contributes to the study of climate debates online by examining how the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) played out on YouTube following its release in October 2018. We examined features of 40 videos that ranked the highest in YouTube’s search engine over the course of four weeks after the publication of the report. Additionally, this study examines the shifting visibility of the videos, the nature of the channels that published them and the way in which they articulated the issue of climate change. We found that media activity around SR15 was animated by a mix of professional and user-led channels, with the former enjoying higher and more stable visibility in YouTube ranking. We identified four main recurrent themes: disaster and impacts, policy options and solutions, political and ideological struggles around climate change and contested science. The discussion of policy options and solutions was particularly prominent. Critiques of the SR15 report took different forms: as well as denialist videos which downplayed the severity of climate change, there were also several clips which criticized the report for underestimating the extent of warming or overestimating the feasibility of proposed policies.

Bounegru, Liliana, Kari De Pryck, Tommaso Venturini, and Michele Mauri. 2020. “We Only Have 12 Years: YouTube and the IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5C.” First Monday 25(2).

Read the paper online

Drafting an atlas of artificial intelligence’s matters of reflection

To facilitate the exploration of the issues and expertises mobilised by the Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity, we have created an atlas of the recent scientific literature on AI for humanity. Starting from a query targeting both the societal implications of AI technologies and the use of AI in human and social sciences, we collected a corpus of more than 23 thousand bibliographic records corresponding to journal articles and conference proceedings published on these topics in the last five years. Using co-citation techniques and force-directed network layout, we created a base map of the relevant scientific literature and use it to locate the keywords, subject areas and institutions appearing in our bibliographic corpus.
The results of this work revealed the great diversity of matters of reflections to be addressed during the Forum (and by the International Panel on AI that it prefigures), but also the seamless connection between technical questions related to advanced techniques of computation of robotics innovation and social and human implications of their implementation.

See the atlas

What do we see when we look at networks

It is an increasingly common practice in several natural and social sciences to rely on network visualisations both as heuristic tools to get a first overview of relational datasets and as a way to offer an illustration of network analysis findings. Such practice has been around long enough to prove that scholars find it useful to project networks on a space and to observe their visual appearance as a proxy for their topological features. Yet this practice remains largely based on intuition and no investigation has been carried out on to render explicit the foundations and limits of this type of exploration. This paper provides such analysis, by conceptually and mathematically deconstructing the functioning of force-directed layouts and by providing a step-by-step guidance on how to make networks readable and interpret their visual features.

What do we see when we look at networks an introduction to visual network analysis and force-directed layouts. Tommaso Venturini, Mathieu Jacomy, Pablo Jensen

Read the paper in Arxiv

Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS)

I’ve recently be asked to be part of the editorial board of the newly founded journal “Political, Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences” (P.A.R.I.S.S.).

The journal aims to encourage scholars to write across disciplines, academic cultures and writing styles in order to open up orthodox conventions based on assumptions about what proper scholarship should do. Similar to questions of nature that cannot be neatly separated into categories of chemistry, biology or physics, we believe that the social sciences require transversal sites for thought and practice. P.A.R.I.S.S. is such a site. Our journal constitutes a step towards transversality and de-disciplinarization, bringing together multiple disciplines in an effort to transcend them.

See the homepage of the journal

Expert hearing on disinformation and ‘junk news’

I have been invited to intervene as expert on junk news and online misinformation at the 140th Assembly of the Inter Parliamentary Union (Doha, 09/04/19).

Read the answers I gave during my hearing

DOOM (systems-theory for the Disorders Of Online Media) project

The project DOOM (systems-theory for the Disorders Of Online Media), which I will be co-leading with Paolo Frasca, has been selected for funding by the CNRS interdisciplinary call for project 80|PRIME. The project includes a scholarship for one PhD student. Get in touch if interested.

Project abstract:
Online social media have a key role in contemporary society and the debates that take place on them are known to shape political and societal trends. For this reason, pathological phenomena like the formation of “filter bubbles” and the viral propagation of “fake news” are observed with concern. The scientific assumption of this proposal is that these information disorders are direct consequences of the inherent nature of these communication media, and more specifically of the collective dynamics of attention thereby. In order to capture these dynamics, this proposal advocates the mathematical modelling of the interplay between the medium (algorithmic component) and the users (human component). The resulting dynamics shall be explored by a system-theoretic approach, using notions such as feedback and stability.

Download the project document

Visiting at Australia National University

From January to March 2019, I have been visiting research at the School of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, thanks to a scholarship of the College of Arts & Social Sciences.

During my visit I have organised three sessions of my “Writing with Data Workshop” and I have worked with professors Robert Ackland and Adrian Mackenzie. Together, we organised a data sprint on online attention dynamics, where we concentrated in particular on data extracted from Reddit.

Download the slides of the introductory presentation and of the results of my group

“API-based research” or how can digital sociology and digital journalism studies learn from the Cambridge Analytica affair

This paper draws on the Cambridge Analytica scandal to discuss the future of API-based research and the importance to develop more solid and diverse digital fieldwork practice.

API-based research is an approach to computational social sciences and digital sociology based on the extraction of records from the datasets made available by online platforms through their application programming interfaces (or APIs). This type of research has allowed the collection of detailed information on large populations, thereby effectively challenging the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods. Lately, access to this source of data has been significantly reduced after a series of scandals connected to the use of personal information collected through online platforms. The closure of APIs, however, can have positive effects, if it encourages researchers to reduce their dependence on mainstream platforms and explore new sources and ways to collect records on online interactions that are closer to the digital fieldwork.

Venturini, Tommaso, and Richard Rogers. 2019. “‘API-Based Research’ or How Can Digital Sociology and Digital Journalism Studies Learn from the Cambridge Analytica Affair.” Digital Journalism, Forthcoming.

Download the preprint

From Fake to Junk News, the Data Politics of Online Virality

‘Fake news’ is a key subject of data politics, but also a tricky a one. As this chapter aims to show, various phenomena signified by this misleading label have little in common, except being opposite to the kind of algorithmic intelligence that most other chapters present as the main concern of data politics. This does not mean that ‘fake news’ is not related to computational analytics or political intentions, but it does mean that this relation is not straightforward.

To discuss this relation, I will go through a three-stage argument. First, I will criticise the notion of ‘fake news’, dismissing the idea that this type of misinformation can be defined by its relationship to truth. Second, I will propose a different definition of this phenomenon based on its circulation rather than of its contents. Third, I will reintroduce the connection to data politics, by describing the economic, communicational, technological, cultural and political dimensions of junk news.

Venturini, T. (2019). From Fake to Junk News, the Data Politics of Online Virality. In D. Bigo, E. Isin, & E. Ruppert (Eds.), Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights. London: Routledge (forthcoming).

Download the chapter

 

The Jazz Network

For an upcoming article that I am preparing on Visual Network Analysis with Mathieu Jacomy and Pablo Jensen, I’ve created a testbed network of the actors of the jazz scene.

Download the zipped .gexf of the network

Read how it has been generated and analysed

Confessions of a Fake News Scholar

Tommaso Venturini (2018). Confession of a Fake News Scholar (or “on to study popular subject). 68th Annual Conference – International Communication Association, Prague, 24-28 May 2018

Should we talk about “fake news”? According to several observers, we shouldn’t as this notion is vague, politically dangerous; indistinguishable from past misinformation; charged with a simplistic idea of truth, and missing the most important feature of the phenomenon it defines. Such feature is not deceptiveness, but virality – the capacity to pollute media public debate by spreading and transforming. But if virality is the defining features of fake news, then isn’t their critique another way of propagating the infection? Yes and no. Yes, if we stop at the critique. No, if we exploit it to encourage a media inquiry. Because of its simplicity, exaggeration, diffusion, rapid reproduction and mutation, fake news may be the drosophila of media studies.

Download the full paper

Download the slides of my presentation

A Reality Check(-list) for Digital Methods

Venturini, T., Bounegru, L., Gray, J., & Rogers, R. (2018). A reality check(list) for digital methods. New Media & Society, (forthcoming), doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769236

Digital Methods can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena. The strength of these methods comes from their capacity to take advantage of the data and computational capacities of online platforms; their weakness comes from the difficulty to separate the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest (‘the medium is the message’, according to McLuhan’s 1964 dictum). In this article, we discuss various methodological difficulties deriving from the lack of separation between medium and message and propose eight practical precautions to deal with it.

Download the preprint

Read the article online

Ploughing Digital Landscapes: How Facebook Influences the Evolution of Live Video Streaming

Rein, K. & Tommaso Venturini. (2018). Ploughing Digital Landscapes: How Facebook Influences the Evolution of Live Video Streaming. New Media & Society Forthcoming. doi:10.1177/1461444817748954.

In this article, we discuss Facebook’s strategy to influence the development of a new communication format known as live video streaming. We take this case study as an example of the ways in which Web platforms operate to harness media innovations and their social uses. The case of Facebook Live illustrates exemplary how, far from developing spontaneously, media landscapes are actively shaped by the technological and financial initiatives of their more influential players. In this article, we describe how Facebook’s technical infrastructure and partnership scheme influence the editorial organisation as well as the storytelling of live video streaming.

Download the preprint

Read the article online

A Field Guide to Fake News

Today sees the launch of A Field Guide to “Fake News and Other Information Disorders, a new free and open access resource to help students, journalists and researchers investigate misleading content, memes, trolling and other phenomena associated with recent debates around “fake news”.

The field guide responds to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay between digital platforms, misleading information, propaganda and viral content practices, and their influence on politics and public life in democratic societies.

It contains methods and recipes for tracing trolling practices, the publics and modes of circulation of viral news and memes online, and the commercial underpinnings of this content. The guide aims to be an accessible learning resource for digitally-savvy students, journalists and researchers interested in this topic.

Download the field guide

Read an article presenting the project and its first results

Read an article using the methods of the guide on BuzzFeed News

Public Data Lab

I am very proud to introduce the new research network I have recently co-founded with friends and colleagues from all over Europe:

The Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org) is a network of European researchers working on digital data and public interventions. It seeks to facilitate research, engagement and debate around the future of the data society. We work in collaboration with researchers, practitioners, journalists, civil society groups, designers, developers and public institutions across the world. Our approach characterised by:

  • Intervention around social, political, economic and ecological issues;
  • Participation through involving different publics in the co-design of our work;
  • Artisanship in advancing the craft of developing data projects and experiences;
  • Openness in sharing our research, data and code for all to use.

See our website

Hors champs: la multipositionnalité par l’analyse des réseaux

Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., Baneyx, A., & Girard, P. (2016). Hors champs: la multipositionnalité par l’analyse des réseaux. Réseaux, 199(5), 11–42. http://doi.org/10.3917/res.199.0011

This article is based on a research by Luc Boltanski on professor of the Institut des Étude Politique of Paris. In this research, Boltanski relies on a table to represent different social fields and to show that the French elite and elites in general are characterized above all by its multipositionality – that is to say by the tendency of its members to occupy several positions in several fields. By replacing Boltanski’s table with a network of individuals and institutions, we will discuss the features and the benefits of a heterogeneous network sociology.

Download the preprint

Read the article online

The Fish Tank Complex of Social Modelling

Venturini, T. (2018). The Fish Tank Complex of Social Modelling. In M. Nagatsu & A. Ruzzene (Eds.), Frontiers of Social Science: A Philosophical Reflection. New York: Bloomsbury (forthcoming).

In the BBC documentary The Blue Planet, the British naturalist David Attenborough narrates marine life commenting on the ‘time-lapsed’ images of a tropical reef. The images are beautiful and surprising. Played at accelerated speed, the sequences reveal corals for what they are: not minerals or plants, but animals who grow, crawl, hunt and fight to survive. The effect is startling: the change of tempo shatters the relation between the action and its scenery. While the expected actors disappeared (as the fishes of the reef), the theater wings suddenly come alive and take the center of the stage. A similar effect, I hold, can be experienced in social phenomena by abandoning the spatial metaphors we traditionally use to understand them.

I refer here to the classic micro/macro distinction, which not only distinguish actors from structures, but also picture them as nested levels, with actors moving through structures as trains travelling through railways. To be sure, most social theories admit relations between the two levels. Yet, relation does not question separation and our imagination remains trapped in a sort of ‘fish tank complex’ – a conceptual framing where social actors moves against a static background, like fishes in a plastic aquarium.

Download the PDF of the article

Visual Network Exploration for Data Journalists

Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., Bounegru, L., & Gray, J. (2018). Visual Network Exploration for Data Journalists. In S. I. Eldridge & B. Franklin (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Developments in Digital Journalism Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. (forthcoming)

Networks are classic but under-acknowledged figures of journalistic storytelling.  Yet, journalists have so far made little use of the analytical resources offered by networks. To address this problem in this chapter we examine how “visual network exploration” may be brought to bear in the context of data journalism in order to explore, narrate and make sense of large and complex relational datasets. We borrow the more familiar vocabulary of geographical maps to show how key graphical variables such as position, size and hue can be used to interpret and characterise graph structures and properties. We illustrate this technique by taking as a starting point a recent example from journalism, namely a catalogue of French information sources compiled by Le Monde’s Decodex. We establish that good visual exploration of networks is an iterative process where practices to demarcate categories and territories are entangled and mutually constitutive.

Download the PDF of the article

An unexpected journey: A few lessons from sciences Po médialab’s experience

Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., Meunier, A., & Latour, B. (2017). An unexpected journey: A few lessons from sciences Po médialab’s experience. Big Data & Society, 4(2), 205395171772094. doi.org/10.1177/2053951717720949

In this article, we present a few lessons we have learnt during our experience at the Sciences Po médialab. These lessons concern three main aspects of the sociological work: the traces and data that we investigate; the methods with which we analyse them; and the social theory that we use to interpret our results. In all these aspects, the médialab journey brought us to overcome the oppositions that characterize social sciences (qualitative/quantitative, situation/aggregation, micro/macro, local/global) and to move in the direction of a more continuous sociology.

Download the PDF of the article
Read the article online at Big Data and Society

From Analysis to Presentation

Boechat, Marina, and Tommaso Venturini. 2016. “From Analysis to Presentation: Information Visualization for Reifying Issues and Reenacting Insights in Visual Data Analysis.” Les Cahiers Du Numérique 4: 185–205. doi:10.3166/LCN.12.4.185-204.

In this paper, we discuss the use of information visualization in digital sociology, (particularly in Controversy Mapping), and its role in outlining issues and objects of study through progressive insights. We believe the differences in visualizations between analysis and presentation are better understood as linked by a chain of transformations, rather than as two separate and stable levels of representation. We propose that, through such chain, two research movements are performed: the reification of issues, related to the construction of a stable consensus, and the reenaction of insights, that points to the role of visualizations as communication tools. We will illustrate such movements and effects by using a few examples of visualizations produced in the EMAPS research project.

Read the preprint version of the paper

INRIA Advanced Research Fellowship

dynamicmodelling

Starting from January 2017 and for three years, I will be the recipient of an advanced research fellowship of INRIA (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) and work on social modelling at the Institut des Systèmes Complexes Rhône-Alpes.

Read my research project

HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches)

ControversyMappingTravelCompanion

Controversy Mapping, a Travel Companion
HDR in media studies (CNU 71), defended and obtained on 26/09/2016
by Tommaso Venturini (under the Supervision of Pablo Jensen, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
Jury: Richard Rogers, Dominique Pestre, Didier Bigo, Eric Fleury, Dominique Vinck

Since my arrival at the médialab of Sciences Po, 6 years ago, my research path has not been straight. Following the projects that I led (EMAPS, MEDEA) and to which I have participated (MACOSPOL, Contropedia, SOURCE, DIME-SHS Web, Politiques de la Terre, AIME…), it has zigzagged through disciplines and traditions and brought me in contact with various epistemic communities, including STS; digital methods; complex network analysis; environmental politics; information design; media studies; natural language processing and more.

In all these encounters, what interested me has been the chance to run experiments, test unusual mixes, try new approaches to the study of collective life. Orthodoxy and faultlessness, I confess, have never been my greatest preoccupations.

Yet, my experiments have not been inconsistent. Traveling far lands, I did not just sightsee. I collected bits and pieces and stitched them together in an ensemble that starts to look (to me at least) more and more coherent. Such coherence, of course, is not straightforward. It is tentative, in progress and, too often, implicit. My HDR thesis provides a much-welcomed occasion to address such coherence explicitly and to do it through a comprehensive account of what Controversy Mapping is to me.

It is CM that brought me to the médialab, it is the course I have been teaching the last 8 years and the approach that supported most of my projects. CM is also a method with a solid tradition and an upward trajectory, increasingly used around the world for teaching and research. Yet, CM still lacks its instruction manual – a text that would distill its unusual brew of STS reflections and digital developments. My HDR thesis is an effort in this direction.

Contrasting medium and genre on Wikipedia to open up Geoengineering

WikipediaGeoengineering

Markusson, Nils, Tommaso Venturini, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, and David Laniado. 2016. “Contrasting Medium and Genre on Wikipedia to Open up Geoengineering.” Big Data & Society 3(2).

An investigation of the place of geoengineering in public debate through the study of networks of Wikipedia pages.

Read the article online

Download the article

Data-Sprint: a Public Approach to Digital Research

Datasprint

Venturini, T., Munk, A., & Meunier, A. (2016). Data-Sprint: a Public Approach to Digital Research. (C. Lury, P. Clough, M. Michael, R. Fensham, S. Lammes, A. Last, & E. Uprichard, Eds.) Interdisciplinary Research Methods (forthcoming).

This paper is about the politics of transdisciplinarity. Not in the sense of the research politics fostering collaboration across disciplines, but in the stronger sense of transcending disciplinary boundaries to make significant political contributions. In short: it is about the making research public. Also, this chapter is not theoretical: it discusses the role of social sciences in collective life, but only to introduce (through a concrete example) an original transdisciplinary practice, that we call data-sprinting.

Read the pre-print version of the paper

How to Tell Stories with Networks: Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad

NarratingNetworks

Venturini, T., Bounegru, L., Jacomy, M., & Gray, J. (2016). How to Tell Stories with Networks: Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad. In Datafied Society. Amsterdam: University Press (forthcoming).

The preview of the pre-print version of a chapter for the Datafied Society book that I wrote with Liliana Bounegru, Mathieu Jacomy and Jonathan Gray.

It use the network of the characters of Homer’s Iliad to exemplify six different types of stories that can be told about a graph.

Read the pre-print version

EMAPS wins the Etoiles d’Europe prize

Happy to announce that the project EMAPS has won the prize Etoiles d’Europe celebrating the best EU financed research project.

See Climaps.eu the platform developed by EMAPS.

Read an interview about the prize.

Climate Negotiations Browser

ClimateNegotiations

On the eve of the UNFCCC COP21, I am proud to introduce our new platform on climate negotiations,

I have worked for more of one year to this platform with the help of the IISD, the médialab of Sciences Po, the LSIR EPFL and the Atelier Iceberg. The platform allows to browse through the contents of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and contains two interfaces:
– The discover interface providing a few visualizations on the visibility of actors and issues of the UNFCCC negotiations
The explore interface allowing to ask complex questions such as: “give me all the ENB sections in which AOSIS discuss about Loss and Damage after Warsaw

More info here: http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/?p=3477

Visual Network Analysis

VisualNetworkAnalysis

Venturini, T., Jacomy, M, De Carvalho Pereira, D. Visual Network Analysis (working paper)

The visualization of networks has so far lacked of reflexivity and formalization. Though all network analysis packages propose rich libraries of visualization functions, most literature on networks analysis is still centered on mathematical metrics and does not detail how to read visualized network. We painfully lack the conceptual tools to think about the projection of graphs in the space.  This paper means to contribute to such reflection and propose a tentative framework for the visual analysis of networks. To do so we will draw on the visual semiotics of Jacques Bertin (1967) and in particular on three of its variables: positions, size and hue. The papers is divided in three sections, each addressing one of the three variables. Each section will explain how to project one variable on networks and provide guidance on how to make sense of the resulting image.

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS IS A WORKING (NON-FINALIZED) PAPER

Download the working paper

Designing Controversies and their Publics

DesigningControversies

Venturini, T., Ricci, D., Mauri, M., Kimbell, L., & Meunier, A. (2015). Designing Controversies and their Publics. Design Issues, 31(3)

Striving to make the intricacy of scientific debate readable for a larger public, controversy mapping is trapped in a classic simplicity/complexity trade-­off: how to respect the richness of controversies without designing maps too complicated to be useful? Having worked on the question for almost two years in a project bringing together social scientists and designers (emapsproject.com1), we can now propose a way out of this contradiction and suggest three ways of moving through the simplicity/complexity continuum.

Dowload the preprint

Watch a conference I gave on the topic at the University of Leuven

Actor-Network VS Network Analysis VS Digital Networks Are We Talking About the Same Networks?

notanetwork

Venturini, T., Munk, A., & Jacomy, M. (2016). Actor-Network VS Network Analysis VS Digital Networks Are We Talking About the Same Networks? In D. Ribes & J. Vertesi (Eds.), DigitalSTS: A Handbook and Fieldguide (forthcoming).

A paper that I wrote with Anders Munk and Mathieu Jacomy for the forthcoming Handbook of Digital STS. It addresses the thorny question of the ambiguity of the word ‘network’

Read the working version of the paper

Fill in the Gap. A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences

SchellingModel

Venturini, T., Jensen, P., & Latour, B. (2015). Fill in the Gap: A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(2), 11.

In the last few years, electronic media brought a revolution in the traceability of social phenomena. As particles in a bubble chamber, social trajectories leave digital trails that can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of collective life. To make sense of these traces a renewed collaboration between social and natural scientists is needed. In this paper, we claim that current research strategies based on micro-macro models are unfit to unfold the complexity of collective existence and that the priority should instead be the development of new formal tools to exploit the richness of digital data.

The paper has scored #1 in the most viewed JASSS articles for over 8 weeks!

Read the paper in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulations

Download the preprint

Méthodes digitales: Approches quali/quanti des données numériques

reseaux

Venturini, T., Cardon, D., & Cointet, J.-P. (2015). Méthodes digitales: Approches quali/quanti des données numériques – Présentation du numéro spécial. Réseaux, 188, 9. doi:10.3917/res.188.0009

The special issue on digital and quali-quantitative methods that I curated with Jean-Philippe Cointet et Dominique Cardon for the French journal Réseaux.

Day after day new methods appear in the social sciences eroding the classical dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative approaches, circulating between micro and macro, local and global, and allowing researchers to process large amounts of data without sacrificing the thickness of their analysis. These are the experiences gathered in this issue, without exclusion of disciplines, objects or approaches.

Read the introduction to the volume

Read the papers of the special issue

Three Maps and Three Misunderstandings : A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy

MappingClimateNegotiations

Venturini, T., Baya-laffite, N., Cointet, J., Gray, I., Zabban, V., & De Pryck, K. (2014). Three Maps and Three Misunderstandings : A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy. Big Data & Society, 1:1

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. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. 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.

Download the full text 
Read the article online
See the images at hi-resolution

ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization

ForceAtlas2

Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heyman, S. & Bastian, M. (2014). ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software. PlosONE, 9:6

Gephi is a network visualization software used in various disciplines (social network analysis, biology, genomics…). One of its key features is the ability to display the spatialization process, aiming at transforming the network into a map, and ForceAtlas2 is its default layout algorithm. We lay out its complete functioning for the users who need a precise understanding of its behaviour, from the formulas to graphic illustration of the result. We propose a benchmark for our compromise between performance and quality. We also explain why we integrated its various features and discuss our design choices.

Download the full text 
Read the article online in PlosONE

Climaps by EMAPS, A Global Issue Atlas of Climate Change Adaptation

Climaps

Climaps.eu presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS, as well as its process: an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate. To do so, EMAPS gathered a team of social and data scientists, climate experts and information designers. It also reached out beyond the walls of Academia and engaged with the actors of the climate debate.

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories guiding the users in the combined reading of several maps. The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalists…) and to citizens willing to engage with the issues of climate adaptation. It employs advanced digital methods to deploy the complexity of the issues related to climate adaptation and information design to make this complexity legible.

See the Climaps Online Atlas

See the Summary for Policy Maker of the Project on the Social Sciences Research Network

Intangible Cultural Heritage Webs: comparing national networks with digital methods

IntangibleCulturalHeritage

Severo, M., & Venturini, T. (2013). Intangible Cultural Heritage: Webs Comparing national networks with digital methods. New Media and Society, (forthcoming), 1–20. doi:10.1177/1461444814567981

The 2003 Unesco Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is addressed to States and assigns them several tasks. No State, however, can accomplish all these tasks without mobilizing a wide network of institutions, associations and individuals. The national ICH policies intersect, overlap and often transform the existing relationships among these actors. This paper aims at comparing several national networks (France, Italy, Switzerland) involved in the implementation of the 2003 Unesco Convention in order to highlight national trends and specificities. The analysis will employ an innovative methodology based on digital methods and aimed at exploring the landscapes of websites dedicated to the intangible heritage. Analyzing the hyperlinking strategies of ICH actors, we will identify the specific web topology of each nation, showing which actors are central and peripheral, whether clusters or cliques are formed and who plays the roles of authority and hub.

Download the preprint

See the article in the journal website

See the images at hi-resolution

Contropedia (Controversy Mapping in Wikipedia)

Contropedia

Funded by the Network of Excellence in Internet Science (EINS) in the call “Disruptive ideas for an Internet Science”, Contropedia aims to build a platform for the real-time analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia. Controversy metrics will be extracted from the activity streams generated by edits to, and discussions about, individual articles and groups of related articles.
In this project, I coordinate the médialab team and provide advice on the rational of controversy mapping.

See the project website

Watch a video presenting Contropedia

Controversy Mapping Syllabus

Crash

The syllabus of the two controversy mapping course I will teach at Sciences Po

PSIA (Paris School of International Affairs)

SCUBE (double licence en sciences et sciences sociales)

ASP The Construction of Innovation Networks

ASP

In 2012 and 2013, I have been responsible for organizing the module on Innovation Networks at the the Alta Scuola Politecnica gathering the 150 best students of the Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. In a week-long intensive workshop, the students learn about Science and Technology Studies and Digital Methods perform the analysis of an innovation network.

See one of the lessons that I have given at ASP

Des Migrants et des Mots

ClimateMigrants

Venturini, T., Gemenne, F., & Severo, M. (2013). Des Migrants et des Mots. Une analyse numérique des débats médiatiques sur les migrations et l’environnement. Cultures & Conflits, 88(4).

Though environmental degradations appear today as a major driver of migration flows, the debate about the definition of the relationship between environment and migration remains vivid. In public debates, many terms exist to qualify those who have to migrate because of environmental disruptions: this has lead to controversies surrounding the use of these different terms. This article attempts to document this controversy through a study of the different uses of these terms in public debates online.

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FORCCAST

forccast

The FORCCAST (Formation à la Cartographie des Controverses pour l’Analise de Sciences et de Techniques) project is meant to develop and disseminate the teaching method of controversy mapping. The project has received a 8 years funding by the French Government and gathers a growing consortium of national and international universities.

In the project FORCCAST, I am responsible for the coordination of the Axis 1, on the exploration of techno-scientific controversies.

See the project website

The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts

TheWholeIsSmaller

Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). “The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts” A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads. British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 591–615.

In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows to revisit Gabriel Tarde’s social theory that entirely dispensed
with using notions such as individual or society. By navigating datasets without making the distinction between the level of individual component and that of aggregated structure, it becomes possible to give some credibility to Tarde’s strange notion of ‘monads’.

Download the preprint
Télécharger le preprint en français

Designing Controversies for the Public

DesigningControversies

A conference on how to engage the publics of sociotechnical controversies in the effort of controversy mapping.

I have been invited to give this conference at the 2012 4S conference on Science and Technology Studies (Copenhague – 18/10/12), at the ‘Tactics of Issue Mapping’ seminar of Goldsmith University (London – 26/10/12), at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam (17/04/13) and at the Ecsite Conference on science centres and museums (Gothenburg – 08/06/13).

See the slides of the conference

Visual Network Analysis

VisualNetworkAnalysis

In the last few decades, networks acquired a new set of affordances and reached a larger audience, thanks to the growing availability of tools to design them. Drawn on paper or screen, networks become easier to handle and obtain properties that calculation cannot express. Far from being merely aesthetic, the graphical representation of networks has an intrinsic hermeneutic value. Networks become maps and can be read as such. Yet the visualization of networks has so far lacked of reflexivity and formalization. We designed and read networks as if their visual grammar was obvious, but the more we advance, the more we realize that this is not the case. This conference contributes to such reflection and proposes a tentative framework for the visual analysis of networks.

I have been invited to give this conference as an introductory Paris ThatCamp of Digital Humanities (24/10/12)

See the slides of the Conference
See an example of Visual Network Analysis

Once Upon a Text: an ANT Tale in Text Analysis

anta

 

Venturini, T., & Guido, D. (2012). Once Upon a Text : an ANT Tale in Text Analysis. Sociologica, 3. doi:10.2383/72700

ANTA or Actor-­‐Network Analyzer is a simple piece of software developed at Sciences Po médialab to offer social researchers a simple text-­‐analysis tool attuned with the theoretical tenets of actor-­‐network theory. Striving to make actor-­‐network theory compatible with modern text-­‐analysis, we have learned much about both. In this paper we’ll discuss our adventure in ANT and text-­‐analysis while describing the basic functions of ANTA and providing examples of its usage.

Download the  pre-print

Controversy Mapping

ControversyArchive

Among other things, at Sciences Po I am responsible for coordinating and teaching the courses of Controversy Mapping. Controversy Mapping has been invented by Bruno Latour some twenty years ago as as a method to train students in the observation and description of sociotechnical debates. Since then, the method has evolved considerably and has been implemented by several universities all around the World (Paris, Copenhagen, Milan, Manchester, Amsterdam, Liège, Lausanne, Padova, Trento, Buenos Aires…).

See the archive of the best work of the students of the course

Welcome to Flatland (Against Emergence)

monads

A conference discussing the concept of ’emergence’ in social sciences and its connection to the methodological distinction between qualitative and quantitative research techniques. In the conference, I argue that digital traceability, providing the possibility to envision a new generation of truly quali-quantitative methods, allows to overcome the opposition between micro-interactions and macro-structures and move toward a ‘flat’ (yet not homogeneous) vision of the social.

I have given this conference at “The Unexpected Conference: do human beings behave as atoms” (CREA Paris, 16/11/11) and at the seminar “Réseaux sociaux : des structures à la politique” (IXXI Lyon, 12/12/11).

See the slides of the conference

MEDEA (Mapping Environmental Debates on Adaptation)


To contribute to understanding the challenges raised by climate change and complement the EMAPS project, MEDEA  is meant develop an online toolkit to map the environmental debate in France. Financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (CEP&S call), MEDEA starts under my coordination on November 1st 2011.

Download the project
See the project website

EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science)

picture of a melting glacier
What difference does it makes to be equipped with online tools for mapping technoscientific issues? Can such equipment improve the way we publicly discuss science and technology?

To answer such questions, Bruno Latour and I submitted EMAPS to the EU ‘Science in Society’ call.  Focusing on the web as a tool of collective endeavor, EMAPS aims at engaging the actors involved in climate adaptation debate in an ‘open-air’ experiment on the interactive platform developed within the project. Funded by the European Union Commission, the project starts on November first 2011.

Click here to download the project
See the project website

The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods


Venturini, T. & Latour, B. (2010).“The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods”. Proceedings of Future En Seine.

An article I wrote with Bruno Latour on quali-quantitative methods and digital sociology.

Download the preprint here (English)
Version Française

Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with Actor-Network Theory

Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–273. doi:10.1177/0963662509102694

The cartography of controversies is a set of techniques to explore and visualize issues. It was developed by Bruno Latour as a didactic version of Actor- Network Theory to train college students in the investigation of contemporary socio-technical debate. The scope and interest of such cartography, however, exceed its didactic origin. Adopted and developed in several universities in Europe and the US, the cartography of controversies is today a full research method, though, unfortunately, not a much documented one. To fill this lack of documentation, we draw on our experience as Latour’s teaching assistant, to introduce some of the main techniques of the social cartographer toolkit. In particular, in these pages we will focus on exploration, leaving the discussion of visualization tools to a further paper.

Click here to download the preprint.

Building on Faults: How to Represent Controversies with Digital Methods

sismograph

Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796 – 812. doi:10.1177/0963662510387558.

In this article, I will discuss how to render the complexity of controversiesvthrough an original visualization device: the controversy- website. Capitalizing on the potential of digital technologies, the controversy-website has been developed as a multilayered toolkit to trace and aggregate information on public debates.

Click here to download the preprint.

Sciences Po médialab

medialab

Since its foundation in 2009, I have coordinated the research activities of médialab of Sciences Po.

Created by Bruno Latour, the médialab is a laboratory dedicated to digital research. It is a team of specialists bringing together social scientists, engineers and designers. It is a high- tech facility, a hub for vanguard research, a scientific toolkit and a platform for launching national and international collaborations. The médialab’s project has received an A+ evaluation by the French research evaluation Agency.

See the médialab website

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent The discontinuity effect of explicit media

verbavolant

Venturini, T. (2007). Verba Volant, Scripta Manent: The Discontinuity Effect of Explicit Media. American Behavioral Scientist50(7), 879–896. doi:10.1177/0002764206298313

It is commonly recognized that different social configurations tend to be associated with different types of innovation. Not surprisingly, linear innovations are more likely to be produced by communities of strong and homogeneous ties; while radical innovations are more likely to originate from networks of weak and diverse connections. Yet, there is a second and subtler linkage between social patterns and innovation types: a junction which depends on the nature of the media available to different groups. The key role is played by explicitness. Communities, being relatively homogeneous, can rely on implicit forms of communication, while networks require explicit channels and languages to relate their highly diverse components. This difference in media explicitness tends to produce a difference in innovation styles. According to the main hypothesis of this paper, the more explicit are the media available to a group, the more discontinuous and radical will be the innovation generated. The discontinuity effect of explicit media will be explained with examples drawn from the history of media and technologies and some empirical ground will be provided through the analysis of a much-discussed case of biopiracy.

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