Quantitative methods

Although the word “network” is now ubiquitous and most of the time associated with IT, it has a much longer history and a deeper philosophical import. The paper reviews some of the meaning of the...
The great advantage of the digitalization of maps has been to rematerialize the practice of using maps. It is thus much easier than before to contrast the mimetic from the navigational use of maps...
Even though Tarde is said to have had a literary view of social science, he himself was deeply involved in statistics (especially criminal statistics) and took an essentially quantitative view of...
By pushing to its extreme conclusions recent accounts of formal reasoning in context, this article claims that a machine that cumulates enough context -in the highly reduced forms of co-occurences of...
“The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts” —How Digital Navigation May Modify Social Theory (with Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier). In this paper we argue...
From examples in the history and sociology of techniques, a method is drawn to map out the double displacement of human and non humans assemblies: association and substitution; indicators are then...
In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows one to revisit Gabriel Tarde’s (1843-1904) social theory that entirely dispensed with using notions such as individual or...
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...