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 the end of 2023.
 
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.
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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.

     

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

POST-DOC, 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.

KatrinHerms

Katrin Herms

PHD STUDENT, CNRS
Katrin pursues an interdisciplinary PhD project in sociology linking social network analysis of polarized Internet communities in France and Germany with face-to-face Interviews.

RomainAvouac

Romain Avouac

ADMINISTRATEUR DE L'INSEE, TRAINING
Romain works as a trainee public statistician at INSEE (France). As a research assistant, he focuses on developing NLP approaches in order to better assess the semantic similarity between actors' online positions.

ManuelTonneau

Manuel Tonneau

RESEARCH ENGINEER, CNRS
With a background in economics and statistics, Manuel then acquired a machine learning skillset. He will combine stance detection methods and network analysis in an empirical study of echo chambers on Twitter.

TitouanMorvan

Titouan Morvan

RESEARCH ENGINEER, CNRS
Titouan is a mathematics student specializing in statistics and machine learning. He will work on semantic hypergraphs with applications to debates on climate and energy policies.

JonathanStOnge

Jonathan St-Onge

RESEARCH ASSISTANT, CNRS
Jonathan intends to pursue a PhD in computational social science. His research focuses on the structure and dynamics of socio-semantic systems in digital niches using a mix of network theory, probabilistic programming, and natural language processing.

Former members:

JONAS STEIN

NOW PHD STUDENT, RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN

KATHARINA TITTEL

NOW PHD STUDENT, SCIENCES PO PARIS

See the larger team

The Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin

JOIN THE TEAM

A doctoral position may soon open in InfoViz.

We also propose research internships for various levels and durations. Please refer to the open positions on the dedicated page of the team main website:

TO THE OPEN POSITIONS