Digital methods - 1 : Introduction

Introducing Digital
Methods
Tommaso Venturini
tomm.venturini@gmail.com
tommasoventurini.it
Digital Methods - Approaches

Data is the new oil!
(or maybe not)
Nigel Holmes
The Human Face
of Big Data

Data Mining &
unconventional oil

Data is the new
soil!
which makes us…

Tommaso Venturini
Training
• University of Bologna Communication Sciences (Umberto Eco)
• Web design and web development & Virtual communities
• Ph.D. in Society of Information at Milano Bicocca and Paris I
Sorbonne
• MACOSPOL and controversy mapping
Research
• Founder and coordinator of the SP médialab (with Bruno Latour)
• Principal investigator
- EMAPS (EU FP7 on controversy mapping)
- MEDEA (ANR on climate adaptation debate)
- Contropedia (EINS on Wikipedia versioning)
• Lecturer in “Digital Methods” at King’s College London

Selected Publications
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.
Venturini, T., Cardon, D., & Cointet, J.-P. (2015). Méthodes digitales: Approches quali/quanti des données
numériques - Curation and Presentation of the Special Issue. Réseaux, 188, 9.
Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public
Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–273. Citations 185.
Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public
Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796 – 812. Citations 85.
Venturini, T., Ricci, D., Mauri, M., Kimbell, L., & Meunier, A. (2015). Designing Controversies and their Publics.
Design Issues, 31(3).
Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). “The whole is always smaller than its
parts”: a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 590–615. Citations 169.
Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heymann, S., & Bastian, M. (2014). ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout
Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software. PloS One, 9(6). Citations 161.
Venturini, T., Baya Laffite, N., Cointet, J.-P., Gray, I., Zabban, V., & De Pryck, K. (2014). Three maps and three
misunderstandings: A digital mapping of climate diplomacy. Big Data & Society, 1(2).
Borra, E., Weltevrede, E., Ciuccarelli, P., Kaltenbrunner, A., Laniado, D., … Venturini, T. (2014). Contropedia - the
analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia articles. In OpenSym 2014 Proceedings.

Module’s Outline
1. Introduction (avoiding a few misunderstandings)
2. Beyond qualitative and quantitative methods
3. The art of querying
4. The art of triangulating
5. Meet the network
6. Hands on networks
7. Visual network analysis
8. Extracting networks
9. The politics of digital methods
10. Conclusion and summary

4 Misunderstanding
1. Digital is not digitized
2. Tracing is not neutral
3. Size is not everything
4. Digital is not automatic

Digitized Ethnography
(virtual reality late ‘80-early ‘90)
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual
community: Homesteading on the
electronic frontier.
Negroponte, N. (1995). Being
digital.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen.
Identity in the Age of the Internet.
Barlow, J.P. (1996). A Declaration of
the Independence of Cyberspace
Digitized Statistics
(www.limesurvey.org)

The End of the Virtual
(Inaugural Speech, New Media & Digital Culture Chair, University of Amsterdam 8 May 2009)
I will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by
transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the
Internet... How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and
recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be
repurposed for social and cultural research? (p. 1)
The conceptual point of departure for the research program is the recognition
that the Internet is not only an object of study, but also a source (p. 3)
Collecting it and analyzing it for social and cultural research requires not only
a new outlook about the Internet, but method too to ground findings (p. 20)

Lous Marin(2001)
On Representation
Stanford University Press

Jude Umeh (2007). The World Beyond Digital Rights Management
Tracing collective phenomena is not cheaper
The price is paid by someone else

Askitas, N., & Zimmermann, K. (2011). Health and Well-Being in the Crisis. IZA Discussion Paper
Digital traces are second-handed

Digital traces are second-handed

What happened on the September 25 2005?

A pseudo-exhaustive
map of the Web
http://internet-map.net

A good
map of the Web
http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/visuel/2012/0
2/02/cartographie-de-la-blogosphere-politique-
en-2012_1635269_823448.html

Patrick Blanc
Two Gardens

(corpus harvesting)

(terms extraction)
http://medialab.sciences-
po.fr/publications/misunde
rstandings/table-1

(extraction cleaning)
http://62.210.188.24/negociations/web_cop_simpler2new.html

(terms merging)
http://medialab.sciences-po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/table-
2

(terms clustering)
po.fr/publications/misunde
rstandings/figure-1

(time analysis)
po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/figu
re-7

(findings narration)
http://climaps.eu/#!/narrative/mitigation-and-adaptation-in-the-unfccc-debates

(and back to square one)
www.climatenegotiations.org

(and back again)

On digital traceability
Venturini, Tommaso, and Bruno Latour. 2010.
“The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-Quantitative Methods”
in Proceedings of Future En Seine 2009. Paris, pp. 87–101
Venturini, Tommaso. 2012.
“Building on Faults: How to Represent Controversies with Digital Methods”
in Public Understanding of Science 21(7):796–812.
Venturini, Tommaso et al. 2014.
“Three Maps and Three Misunderstandings: A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy”
in Big Data & Society 1(2).

Tommaso Venturini
tommasoventurini.it

Digital methods - 1 : Introduction

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