A research infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities
At Cortext, our goal is to empower researchers in the social sciences and humanities by promoting advanced qualitative-quantitative mixed methods. Our primary focus is on studies about the dynamics of science, technology and innovation, and about the roles of knowledge and expertise in societies.
We understand the move towards digital humanities and computational methods not as addressing a technological gap for the social sciences, but rather as entailing entirely new assemblages between its disciplines and those of modern statistics and computer sciences. We work to tackle ever more complex research problems and deal with the profusion of new and diverse sources of information without losing sight of the situatedness and reflexivity required of studies of human societies.
Cortext is hosted by the LISIS research unit at Gustave Eiffel University, and was launched by French institutes IFRIS and INRAE, receiving their continued support.
Cortext Manager
Cortext Manager is our current main attraction, a publicly available web service providing data analysis methods curated and developed by our team of researchers and engineers.
You upload a textual corpus in order to analyse its discourse, names, categories, citations, places, dates etc, with methods for science/controversy/issue mapping, distant reading, document clustering, geo-spatial and network visualizations, and more.
You can jump straight to Cortext Manager and create an account, but we strongly suggest taking a look at the Documentation and Tutorials as you start your journey.
@inproceedings{barbier2012reconstruction,
title = {Reconstruction of Socio-Semantic Dynamics in Sciences-Society Networks: Methodology and Epistemology of large textual corpora analysis},
author = {Marc Barbier and Jean-Philippe Cointet},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261774173_Reconstruction_of_Socio-Semantic_Dynamics_in_Sciences-Society_Networks_Methodology_and_Epistemology_of_large_textual_corpora_analysis_Communication_to_the_Science_and_Democracy_Network_Annual_Meeting_},
year = {2012},
date = {2012-01-01},
booktitle = {Science and Democracy Network, Annual Meeting},
abstract = {Until recent time, the description, light-modeling and interpretation of socio-cognitive dynamics of science-society relations required a constructivist approach, involving collecting, reading, classifying and interpreting tasks performed by scholars examining sets of texts, archives, interviews, etc. The growing mass of data produced in the so-called Knowledge Society owes a lot to the acceleration and profusion of digital tools that are now widely used in different areas of human activities: work, culture, leisure, political expression, etc. Social scientists now largely acknowledge that the various modes of interaction brought by new information and communication technologies are changing the very nature of micro-politics and the expression of the self. In our views the conditions for producing knowledge from a Science & Technology Studies point of view are changed too, for at least three reasons: • the deluge of electronic sources of data overloads our capacity of enquiry, • S&TS dynamics now intertwine heterogeneous actors, matters of facts and matters of concerns coming from different arenas call for an integrated understanding of knowledge production and circulation. • Nevertheless, new digital infrastructures specifically designed for social sciences and humanities make it possible to equip scientists with tools that enable them to tackle the complexity of heterogeneous textual corpora dynamics and to develop innovative analytical methodologies that will bring new insights and renewed capacities to investigate contemporary issues.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Until recent time, the description, light-modeling and interpretation of socio-cognitive dynamics of science-society relations required a constructivist approach, involving collecting, reading, classifying and interpreting tasks performed by scholars examining sets of texts, archives, interviews, etc. The growing mass of data produced in the so-called Knowledge Society owes a lot to the acceleration and profusion of digital tools that are now widely used in different areas of human activities: work, culture, leisure, political expression, etc. Social scientists now largely acknowledge that the various modes of interaction brought by new information and communication technologies are changing the very nature of micro-politics and the expression of the self. In our views the conditions for producing knowledge from a Science & Technology Studies point of view are changed too, for at least three reasons: • the deluge of electronic sources of data overloads our capacity of enquiry, • S&TS dynamics now intertwine heterogeneous actors, matters of facts and matters of concerns coming from different arenas call for an integrated understanding of knowledge production and circulation. • Nevertheless, new digital infrastructures specifically designed for social sciences and humanities make it possible to equip scientists with tools that enable them to tackle the complexity of heterogeneous textual corpora dynamics and to develop innovative analytical methodologies that will bring new insights and renewed capacities to investigate contemporary issues.
@online{Mogoutov2012,
title = {The Digital Methods Initiative Summerschool 2012},
author = {Andrei Mogoutov and Jean-Philippe Cointet and Erik Borra and Michael Stevenson and Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz and Richard Rogers and Natalia Sanchez and Tommaso Venturini and Marta Severo and Bernhard Rieder},
editor = {The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI)},
url = {https://digitalmethods.net/Dmi/Summerschool2012Presentations
https://digitalmethods.net/Dmi/Summerschool2012Schedule
https://digitalmethods.net/Dmi/Summerschool2012Workshops},
year = {2012},
date = {2012-07-02},
urldate = {2012-07-02},
abstract = {The Digital Methods Initiative Summerschool 2012 workshops
Crawling & Scraping
The workshop serves as an introduction to two classic digital methods techniques for issue mapping and analysis. A discussion of the Issue Crawler and the Lippmannian device is followed by a short exercise in which we'll study the presence of skeptics among top sources of information related to climate change.
Tracking the Trackers
In this short workshop you will learn how to map the cookie ecology related to a set of websites using the DMI Tracker Tracker tool and Gephi. The Tracker Tracker tool was conceived at the Digital Methods Winterschool 2012 in January. It is build on top of the anti-tracking plugin www.ghostery.com and allows to identify the invisible web, devices that track user activities online and the services associated to them. In order to prepare for this workshop we recommend reading the related projects and materials listed below. Please download and install Gephi athttps://gephi.org/ before the workshop starts so you can also learn how to visualize your results.
CorText: Open Platform for Heterogeneous Data Collection, Analysis and Visualization
IFRIS Digital Platform has developed a powerful web based software solution to address the needs of social scientists conducting empirical studies in the fields of Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Digital Humanities. The software platform CorText is an open online service for heterogeneous data analysis, modeling and visualization. The platform has the ambition to provide powerful data mash-up capacities transforming various data sources to structured analytical database. CorText platform offers a large spectrum of analytical tools integrating methods and approaches coming from Data Mining, computational linguistics, dynamical systems modeling, (post-)network analysis.
Query Design & List Building
How does one build a source set? How does one identify key words? How to query the source sets for the key words?
Actor-Network Textual Analysis (ANTA)
Having its roots in the laboratories studies movement, actor-network theory has always had in ethnography its privileged research method. Still, at least in the words of its founders, ANT has always longed for a more quantitative grasp of its objects. Until recently all the attempts to devise an integrated methodology for actor-network text analysis were frustrated by the scarcity of text to be analyzed. A part from scientific literature and media discourses it was difficult to find large amount of digitized text to investigate. In the last few years, this bottleneck has been spectacularly removed by the advent of electronic media and of digital traceability. The deluge of digitized texts made available online by all sort of actors (institutions, individuals, associations, media, activists, scientists…) calls for new tools of analysis at the same time more user-friendly and more powerful. ANTA or Actor-Network Analyzer is one of such tools. It has been developed at Sciences Po médialab to offer social researchers a simple text-analysis toolkit attuned with the theoretical tenets of actor-network theory.
Working with Networks: Analysis and Visualization (Gephi)
Network analysis has become a common technique for working with various types of data. Especially the gephi graph analysis toolkit has made the method significantly more accessible by providing a relatively easy to use interface for exploring and visualizing graphs. This tutorial will introduce a number of basic concepts from graph theory and explicate them by showing how gephi allows us to work with them.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {online}
}
The Digital Methods Initiative Summerschool 2012 workshops
Crawling & Scraping
The workshop serves as an introduction to two classic digital methods techniques for issue mapping and analysis. A discussion of the Issue Crawler and the Lippmannian device is followed by a short exercise in which we'll study the presence of skeptics among top sources of information related to climate change.
Tracking the Trackers
In this short workshop you will learn how to map the cookie ecology related to a set of websites using the DMI Tracker Tracker tool and Gephi. The Tracker Tracker tool was conceived at the Digital Methods Winterschool 2012 in January. It is build on top of the anti-tracking plugin www.ghostery.com and allows to identify the invisible web, devices that track user activities online and the services associated to them. In order to prepare for this workshop we recommend reading the related projects and materials listed below. Please download and install Gephi athttps://gephi.org/ before the workshop starts so you can also learn how to visualize your results.
CorText: Open Platform for Heterogeneous Data Collection, Analysis and Visualization
IFRIS Digital Platform has developed a powerful web based software solution to address the needs of social scientists conducting empirical studies in the fields of Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Digital Humanities. The software platform CorText is an open online service for heterogeneous data analysis, modeling and visualization. The platform has the ambition to provide powerful data mash-up capacities transforming various data sources to structured analytical database. CorText platform offers a large spectrum of analytical tools integrating methods and approaches coming from Data Mining, computational linguistics, dynamical systems modeling, (post-)network analysis.
Query Design & List Building
How does one build a source set? How does one identify key words? How to query the source sets for the key words?
Actor-Network Textual Analysis (ANTA)
Having its roots in the laboratories studies movement, actor-network theory has always had in ethnography its privileged research method. Still, at least in the words of its founders, ANT has always longed for a more quantitative grasp of its objects. Until recently all the attempts to devise an integrated methodology for actor-network text analysis were frustrated by the scarcity of text to be analyzed. A part from scientific literature and media discourses it was difficult to find large amount of digitized text to investigate. In the last few years, this bottleneck has been spectacularly removed by the advent of electronic media and of digital traceability. The deluge of digitized texts made available online by all sort of actors (institutions, individuals, associations, media, activists, scientists…) calls for new tools of analysis at the same time more user-friendly and more powerful. ANTA or Actor-Network Analyzer is one of such tools. It has been developed at Sciences Po médialab to offer social researchers a simple text-analysis toolkit attuned with the theoretical tenets of actor-network theory.
Working with Networks: Analysis and Visualization (Gephi)
Network analysis has become a common technique for working with various types of data. Especially the gephi graph analysis toolkit has made the method significantly more accessible by providing a relatively easy to use interface for exploring and visualizing graphs. This tutorial will introduce a number of basic concepts from graph theory and explicate them by showing how gephi allows us to work with them.
@book{Demortain2011,
title = {Scientists and the Regulation of Risk: Standardising Control},
author = {David Demortain},
url = {https://books.google.fr/books?id=yzHDiMfTtuwC},
isbn = {9781849809443},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-10-01},
urldate = {2011-10-01},
publisher = {Edward Elgar Publishing, Incorporated},
abstract = {Risks are increasingly regulated by international standards, and scientists play a key role in standardisation. This fascinating book exposes the action of "invisible colleges" of scientists –loose groups of prominent scientific experts who combine practical experience of risk and control with advisory responsibility – in the formulation of international standards. Drawing upon the domains of medicines, "novel foods" and food hygiene, the author investigates new regulatory concepts emerging from invisible colleges, highlighting how they shape consensus and pave the way for international standards. He explores the relationship between science and regulation from theoretic and historic perspectives, and illustrates how scientific experts integrate regulatory actors in commonly agreed modes of control and structures of regulatory responsibilities. Sociological and political implications are also discussed. Using innovative methodologies and an extensive insight into food and pharmaceutical regulation, this book will provide a much-needed reference tool for scholars and students in a range of fields encompassing science and technology studies, public policy, risk and environmental regulation, and transnational governance.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {book}
}
Risks are increasingly regulated by international standards, and scientists play a key role in standardisation. This fascinating book exposes the action of "invisible colleges" of scientists –loose groups of prominent scientific experts who combine practical experience of risk and control with advisory responsibility – in the formulation of international standards. Drawing upon the domains of medicines, "novel foods" and food hygiene, the author investigates new regulatory concepts emerging from invisible colleges, highlighting how they shape consensus and pave the way for international standards. He explores the relationship between science and regulation from theoretic and historic perspectives, and illustrates how scientific experts integrate regulatory actors in commonly agreed modes of control and structures of regulatory responsibilities. Sociological and political implications are also discussed. Using innovative methodologies and an extensive insight into food and pharmaceutical regulation, this book will provide a much-needed reference tool for scholars and students in a range of fields encompassing science and technology studies, public policy, risk and environmental regulation, and transnational governance.
@conference{Parasie2011,
title = {La presse en ligne au service de la démocratie locale. LaVoixduNord.fr dans les élections municipales de 2008},
author = {Sylvain Parasie and Jean-Philippe Cointet and Eric Dagiral},
url = {https://sypar.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/pres_afs_vdn-7juillet11.pdf},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-07-07},
school = {Université Paris Est - IFRIS},
abstract = {Rôle démocratique de la presse en ligne
• discours optimistes : connaissance politique, participation civique
• études empiriques sceptiques : imitation (Boczkowski, 2010), recul de l’investigation, fractionnement du travail (Quandt, 2009)
Question controversée dans le cas de la presse locale
• analyses critiques : collusion élus/localiers, dépolitisation et journalisme de service
• études plus nuancées : Lemieux (2000), Frisque (2010)},
note = {oai:HAL:hal-00675970v1},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Rôle démocratique de la presse en ligne
• discours optimistes : connaissance politique, participation civique
• études empiriques sceptiques : imitation (Boczkowski, 2010), recul de l’investigation, fractionnement du travail (Quandt, 2009)
Question controversée dans le cas de la presse locale
• analyses critiques : collusion élus/localiers, dépolitisation et journalisme de service
• études plus nuancées : Lemieux (2000), Frisque (2010)
Last week, Ale Abdo and Joenio Costa presented at the first ever OpenAlex User Conference a short talk entitled “Analysing OpenAlex data with Cortext”, highlighting the current and [...]
On May 2024, Ale Abdo was at the University of São Paulo invited by two departments to talk about different aspects of Cortext. On the 22nd, a workshop organized with professor Gisele Craveiro [...]
Here in the outskirts of Paris, at Champs-sur-Marne, work is ongoing to build the future of Cortext. It will soon be 8 years since the second version of the open-for-all web service, Cortext [...]
Long trends on twitter: inter-temporal clusters combining hashtags and terms, for all tweets on Scientometrics, Altmetrics, Bibliometrics and Science Of Science from Jan. 2017 to dec. 2021, on a [...]
CorText Newsfeed
Want to stay up-to-date with the latest training sessions and developments in our methods and data? We invite you to subscribe to Cortext Newsfeed, our succint and researcher oriented quarterly newsletter.
Nous utilisons des cookies pour vous garantir la meilleure expérience sur notre site. Si vous continuez à utiliser ce dernier, nous considérerons que vous acceptez l'utilisation des cookies.Ok