Seminar

Styles

Quantitative surveys. Social Science Toolkit

Wednesday 23 October 2024 Wednesday 23 October 2024

From 3 to 6 PM

Danielle Navarro, Generative Art, licence CC BY 4.0

ENS-PSL
45 rue d'Ulm
75005 Paris
France

48.8418371, 2.3440403

Fourth session of the course "Enquêtes quantitatives. Boîte à outils pour sciences sociales", given by Théo Boulakia.

Testimonials, letters and diaries pile up all around you. You're overwhelmed by a mass of private writings. You have two options: pick and choose from this mass, quoting what you like, leaving aside what bothers you; or take it all in, without distinction, and let yourself be surprised. This session starts with an investigation into the experience of the First World War, through the correspondence of farmers, workers, teachers and writers. The question is simple: does the way in which war is written reflect the way in which it is lived? Can style be a window on experience? On a down-to-earth note: how do you turn a box of letters into a database? How do you automatically assign a grammatical class to each word in a text? How to characterize a writer's style using simple indicators? How can we organize the back-and-forth between immersed and remote reading? What graphic representations can be invented to stimulate interpretation?

Wednesday 23 October 2024

Quantitative surveys. Social Science Toolkit

S1 2024-2025.

Data analysis course in social sciences, delivered by Théo Boulakia. The sessions take place on Mondays, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., in the conference room of the Data Science Center (ENS-PSL, 45 rue d'Ulm, at the top of stairs B or C).

Goals of the course: This course offers an introduction to various quantitative methods based on social science surveys. Each session is organized around the meeting between a question (sociological, anthropological, historiographical), data and a method: cartography, dimensionality reduction, partitioning, sequence analysis, textual analysis, Bayesian statistics. The objective of the course is to acquire a schematic understanding of the implementation of these methods, their merits and their limitations. How to represent spatial data and temporal sequences? What do Bayesian statistics provide that the frequentist approach lacks? How to analyze the morpho-synthactic properties of a text? How to go from a large number of variables to a small number of classes? These questions will arise in context, in a dynamic of adjustment between data, method and research question (an investigation dynamic). Programming questions will be covered only in broad terms, no experience in this area is required.

Validation: Submit a four-page document applying one of the methods discovered in progress to your own data: presentation of the data, interest of the method, implementation and interpretation. People without programming experience will be assisted with implementation.

Registration : theo.boulakia [a] ens.psl.eu