In October and  November 2014 we finally had a series of workshops we planned for experimenting and discussing the potential of digital methods for social sciences and humanities. Digital methods are a set of methods aimed at supporting researchers’ ability to explore and display data or objects that can be collected through the Web (Dutton-Jeffreys, 2010). As Richard Rogers (2009) made clear, these methods could not exist or even be conceived without the web, as their mode of operation is based on objects/content/devices/environments that are natively digital, or born in the new medium, as opposed to the ones that simply “migrated” into it. According to other scholars, such as Venturini and Latour (2010), the potential of digital technologies for social sciences research could lie in allowing for the overcoming of the traditional micro/macro dualism, making possible to track both the actors and the interactions among them while collective phenomena emerge, and to develop analyses of social phenomena that achieve at the same time “breadth and depth” (ibid., p. 2).

We had the pleasure to have Tommaso Venturini,  Paul Girard and Benjamin Ooghe Tabanou as our instructors for two two-days workshops in which they showed us the tools they are developing at the Medialab Paris and guided us in applying them to a wide set of research questions.

Opened by a lecture for CES PhD students held by Venturini, the workshops involved 15 researchers from several Portuguese university that applied some of the methods to a wide set of research in progress, such as the case of the Portuguese memorandum during the recent economic crisis in the country, the EU discourse about scientific mobility, the development of the new European Data Protection Act.

The slide from the lecture and the workshop are here.

First session

Second session