Short Abstract:

In STS, we encounter settings where a corpus of inscriptions is relevant yet too large for inspection. This workshop will teach text analysis skills, introducing a platform requiring no technical knowledge, developed by members of the community and whose methods align with our discipline's goals.

Long Abstract:

From 2008, the Cortext platform has been developing methods and supporting the STS community with tools and skills to approach the complex heterogeneous data we find out there. Such digital traces or digitized inscriptions are often relevant and occasionally essential to our qualitative inquiries, yet may come in volumes that render their study impractical.

Cortext offers computational methods designed with STS ideas in mind, open ended and without prescriptions, in order to assist researchers to follow actors, find levers, and describe relations that transcend (and define) scales while keeping focus on the particular. Specializing in textual data – discourse, names, categories, citations, places, dates – it provides methods for science/controversy/issue mapping, distant reading, document clustering, geo-spatial and network visualizations, and more.

This workshop has no prerequisites and will provide participants with skills to obtain, operate on and analyze a few kinds of documents that are widely present in STS settings, such as academic writings, bibliographic records, policy documents, news articles and social media posts. By working through one or two examples, we expect participants to leave equipped to tackle their own particular needs, with the continued assistance of our online forum.

Bring your own computer. No coding skills required. You're welcome to warm up at https://www.cortext.net/

Cortext Manager is a gratis service, and increasingly FLOS Software, developed at Université Gustave Eiffel at the UMR-LISIS with support from IFRIS, INRAE and CNRS.

- Session time: preferably two 90min sessions; feasible with one

- Required space: enough space for participants to use their notebooks

- Materials: WiFi for all, electrical plugs for at least half of the participants

- Maximum number of participants: 17 or less, as determined by available space