Computation at the Service of Social Sciences

UPDATE: This event will begin at 15:45 BST - 15 minutes earlier than originally planned - on Tues 28th September.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. If you have already registered to attend, we hope that you can join us for the duration.

This talk will discuss ways in which digital data and advanced computational methods can be used not to master social research but to serve it. Against grandiose discourses about how “big data” will end up replacing social analysis, this talk will argue that computational techniques could in fact play a more modest but also more interesting ancillary role in preliminary research tasks such as identifying interesting research cases or extending an existing sample. This argument will be made by discussing the case of the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change (IPCC).

Tommaso Venturini is a researcher at the CNRS Centre for Internet and Society. He is also associate researcher of the médialab of Sciences Po Paris and founding member of the Public Data Lab. In 2017 and 2018, he has been researcher at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon and recipient of the “Advanced Research” fellowship of the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. In 2016, he has been “digital methods lecturer” at the Department of Digital Humanities of King's College London. From 2009 to 2015, he has coordinated the research activities of the médialab of Sciences Po Paris.

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