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socsemics is an ERC-supported project focused on the appraisal of so-called echo chambers, « bubbles » or, more broadly, fragmentation in online public spaces.
The project addresses these phenomena through a dual socio-semantic approach, considering jointly the interactional and informational confinement of users.
 
socsemics is hosted by the Computational Social Science team at Centre Marc Bloch since early 2019 and will be active until 2024.
 
You may find the project flyer here.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

More precisely, socsemics aims at addressing a series of fundamental questions pertaining to the existence, structure and dynamics of such bubbles in digital public spaces: how to define and appraise them empirically, how do they form and emerge, which types of topics, claims and actors are mobilized in which of them, which bridges or bottle-necks may interconnect them and, at a higher level, what is the meta-structure of bubbles and what kind of qual-quantitative studies may result from this new type of approach. socsemics already led to the creation of the “graphbrain” subproject, an integrated NLP platform.

socsemics will address several current challenges:

  1. developing a comprehensive theory of reinforcing and self-sustaining socio-semantic communities by appraising the social, semantic and socio-semantic realms simultaneously;
  2. drastically improving content analysis by replacing classical distributional approach with clause analysis, thus enabling quantitative approaches rendering the linguistic complexity of utterances in web corpuses;
  3. fostering the interface between these methods and qualitative approaches, especially through a couple of broad case studies;
  4. interactive platforms implementing the above innovations and facilitating digital social research.

     

Publications

  • Mangold, L., & Roth, C. (2023). Generative models for two-ground-truth partitions in networks. Physical Review E, 108(5), 054308. [open access version]
  • Roth, C., & Hellsten, I. (2023). Socio-semantic configuration of an online conversation space. Social Networks, 75, 186–196. [open access version]
  • Menezes, T., Pottier, A., & Roth, C. (2023). The two sides of the environmental Kuznets curve: A Socio-semantic analysis. OEconomia, 13(2), 279–321. [open access version]
  • Roth, C. (2022). Resilience of socio-semantic bubbles. In E. Lazega, T. A. B. Snijders, & R. P. M. Wittek (Eds.), A Research Agenda for Social Networks and Social Resilience, 145–164. Edward Elgar Publishing. [publisher version]
  • Roth, C., St-Onge, J., & Herms, K. (2022). Quoting is not Citing: Disentangling Affiliation and Interaction on Twitter. Complex Networks & Their Applications X, 705–717. [publisher version]
  • Medeuov, D., Roth, C., Puzyreva, K., & Basov, N. (2021). Appraising discrepancies and similarities in semantic networks using concept-centered subnetworks. Applied Network Science, 6,66. [open access version]
  • Roth, C., & Basov, N. (2020). The socio-semantic space of John Mohr. Poetics, 78(1), 101437. [publisher version]
  • Roth, C., Mazières, A., & Menezes, T. (2020). Tubes and bubbles topological confinement of YouTube recommendations. PloS one, 15(4), e0231703. [open access version]
  • Baltzer, A., Karsai, M., & Roth, C. (2019). Interactional and Informational Attention on Twitter. Information, 10(8), 250. [publisher version]
  • Lerique, S., & Roth, C. (2018). The semantic drift of quotations in blogspace: A case study in short‐term cultural evolution. Cognitive Science, 42(1), 188–219. [open access version]

WHO WE ARE

The project has officially started being hosted at CNRS and Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin in 2019. At the moment, the members of the larger Computational Social Science team who are involved in socsemics include:

Camille roth

FACULTY, CNRS
Camille is a tenured full research scientist at CNRS in computer science. Over the last decade, he also hold tenured professorships in sociology (Sciences Po Paris, U. Toulouse).

Telmo Menezes

POSTDOC, CNRS
Telmo is specialized in Artificial Intelligence and its applications to the Social Sciences. His research is currently focused on representations of knowledge for claim and belief propagation analysis.

Jérémie Poiroux

RESEARCH ASSISTANT, CNRS
ex-PhD student in sociology, Jérémie studies why people participate in online debates.

LenaMangold

Lena Mangold

PHD STUDENT, CNRS
With a background in mathematics and data science, Lena is a PhD student researching socio-semantic clusters in online conversations. Her work will focus on describing the nature of such clusters, the dynamics that lead to their emergence and stability, as well as their meta-level configurations.

Quentin Lobbé

POSTDOC, CMB
Quentin's research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Sciences, Complex Systems and Data Visualization. It focuses on the reconstruction of multi-level socio-technical dynamics from digital traces, with a particular emphasis on web archives mining and knowledge cartography.

Former members:

KatrinHerms

Katrin Herms

PHD STUDENT, CNRS

Noé Durandard

Noé Durandard

NOW PHD STUDENT, PARIS SCIENCES & LETTRES

MaxReinhard

MAX REINHARD

MSC STUDENT AT TU BERLIN

ManuelTonneau

MANUEL TONNEAU

NOW PHD STUDENT, OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE

GovindGandhi

GOVIND GANDHI

MSC STUDENT AT IISER PUNE

RomainAvouac

ROMAIN AVOUAC

NOW ADMINISTRATEUR AT INSEE

TitouanMorvan

TITOUAN MORVAN

MSC STUDENT AT ENS LYON

JonathanStOnge

JONATHAN ST-ONGE

NOW MSC STUDENT AT THE VERMONT COMPLEX SYSTEMS CENTER

JONAS STEIN

NOW PHD STUDENT, RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN

KATHARINA TITTEL

NOW PHD STUDENT, SCIENCES PO PARIS