socsemics was an ERC-supported project focused on the appraisal of so-called echo chambers, « bubbles » or, more broadly, fragmentation in online public spaces.

The project addressed these phenomena through a dual socio-semantic approach, considering jointly the interactional and informational confinement of users.

socsemics has mainly been hosted by the Computational Social Science team at Centre Marc Bloch between 2019 and 2024.

You may find the project flyer here (2019), and a CORDIS press release there (2024).

ABOUT THE PROJECT

More precisely, socsemics aimedd 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 addressed several challenges:

developed a methodology to appraise socio-semantic communities by appraising the social, semantic and socio-semantic realms simultaneously;
improved content analysis by focusing on clauses and sentence structure, rather than term distributions, thus rendering the linguistic complexity of utterances in web corpuses;
fostered the interface between these methods and qualitative approaches, especially through a couple of broad case studies;
implemented interactive platforms to facilitate digital social research.

SOFTWARE and data

Socsemics gave rise to three main open-source libraries/tools, as well as seven open datasets.

graphbrain, an open-source python library implementing semantic hypergraphs [dedicated website] [github page] [seminal paper]

metablox, an open-source python library for quantifying the relationship between categorical node metadata and block structure of a network [related paper] [github page]

chronoblox, an open-source platform for socio-semantic chronophotographic network visualization [related paper] [github page]

the ERC Socsemics data collection on Nakala contains all open datasets released by the project, along with their documentation and related literature. [open repository]

Publications

Basov, N., & Roth, C. (2025). Socio-Semantic Networks. Handbook of Culture and Social Networks, eds.: Nick Crossley & Paul Widdop, Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978 1 80392 877 7

Chiapello, E., & Roth, C. (2025). Socio-genesis of the impact investing world in France. Varieties of Impact Investing, eds.: Philip Basiger et al., Bristol University Press.

Mangold, L., & Roth, C. (2024). Quantifying metadata-structure relationships in networks using description length. Communications Physics, 7(1):331(1-16). [open access version]

Durandard, N., Roth, C. & Menezes, T. (2024). Critical Synthetic Benchmarking of Graph Representation Learning. Proc. Complex Networks and their Applications 2024, Istanbul, Turkey, Dec 10-12.

Lobbé, Q., Roth, C. & Mangold, L. (2024). Chronoblox: Chronophotographic Sequential Graph Visualization. arxiv:2405.07506. [open access version]

Mangold, L., & Roth, C. (2023). Generative models for two-ground-truth partitions in networks. Physical Review E, 108(5), 054308. [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., & Hellsten, I. (2023). Socio-semantic configuration of an online conversation space. Social Networks, 75, 186–196. [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]

Menezes, T., Roth, C. (2021). Semantic Hypergraphs. arXiv:1908.10784v2. [open access version]

Roth, C. (2021) Socio-Semantic Systems. Habilitation à diriger des recherches. Sorbonne Université [open access version]

Roth, C., Mazières, A., & Menezes, T. (2020). Tubes and bubbles topological confinement of YouTube recommendations. PloS one, 15(4), e0231703. [open access version]

Medeuov, D., Roth, C., Puzyreva, K., & Basov, N. (2020) Concept-Centered Comparison of Semantic Networks. Proc. 9th Intl Conf on Complex Networks’20, pp. 330-341. [publisher version]

Roth, C., & Basov, N. (2020). The socio-semantic space of John Mohr. Poetics, 78(1), 101437. [publisher 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]

COMMUNICATIONS

Ève Chiapello, Camille Roth, “Le monde de l’impact investing vu depuis Twitter”, journée d’études « Réformer le capitalisme de l’intérieur ? Acteur·ices, pratiques, mondes sociaux » – 30-31 Mai 2024, ENS Paris.
Camille Roth, “Echo chambers? filter bubbles? it depends“, séminaire Modélisation en sciences sociales et en sciences du vivant, CAMS, Paris, May 15, 2024
Camille Roth, “Construction du champ des études socio-sémantiques”, Les Liens qui font les Humanités numériques, ENS Paris, May 15, 2024
Camille Roth, “The echo chamber of echo chambers”, Digitale Netzwerke: Soziale Formationen im und ums Internet, Philipps Universität Marburg, 14./15. März 2024
Camille Roth, “La chambre d’écho des chambres d’écho”, Séminaire “Dynamique des réseaux et des collectifs”, EHESS, org. Michel Grossetti & Pascal Cristofoli, 12 mars 2024
Camille Roth, “The echo chamber of echo chambers”, MATH+ Activity Group “Mathematics in the Humanities and Social Sciences”, Zuse-Institut Berlin, Feb 22, 2024
Quentin Lobbé, Camille Roth, Lena Mangold (2024). Building stability layout for visualizing temporal series of stochastic block models. In NetSciX 2024, Venice, Italy, Jan 20-21, 2024
Camille Roth, “On two (presumed) blights of large-scale computer-mediated communication systems” IIA+Soc’24 Intelligence Augmentation and Amplification plus Society 2024, IEA/Condorcet, Paris, Jan 16-18, 2024.
Camille Roth, “Semantic graphs and social networks”, keynote at ICCS’23, Berlin, Germany, Sep 11-13, 2023.
Telmo Menezes, Antonin Pottier, Camille Roth, “The two sides of the Environmental Kuznets Curve: A socio-semantic analysis”, EUSN’23, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Sep 4-8, 2023.
Telmo Menezes, Antonin Pottier, Camille Roth, “The two sides of the Environmental Kuznets Curve: A socio-semantic analysis”, IC2S2’23, Copenhagen, Denmark, Jul 17-20, 2023.
Lena Mangold, Camille Roth, “Entropy & fragmentation in socio-semantic networks”, IC2S2 23, Copenhagen, Jul 17-20, 2023.
Lena Mangold, Camille Roth, “Generative models for two-ground-truth partitions in networks”, NetSci 23, Vienna, Jul 10-14, 2023
Camille Roth, “Graphes sémantiques et réseaux sociaux”, keynote at EGC 23rd conf. extraction gestion des connaissances, Lyon, Jan 16-20, 2023.
Camille Roth, “La chambre d’écho des chambres d’échos”, Séminaire du CAMS, Dec 2, 2022, Paris

Camille Roth, “echo chambers? filter bubbles? it depends”, Workshop on “Digital Social Networks”, Fondation des Treilles, Nov 7-11, 2022.
Ève Chiapello, Camille Roth, “Socio-genesis of the impact investing world in France”, Sept 1-2, 2022, Conference on Impact Investing, University of Neuchâtel. Organizers: Philip Balsiger, Daniel Burnier, Noé Kabouche
Telmo Menezes, Camille Roth, Nikita Basov, “Semantic Hypergraph Approach to Semantic Network Induction and Comparison”, EUSN 2022, London, Sept 12-17, 2022.
Lena Mangold, Camille Roth, “Variability in mesoscale structure inference using stochastic blockmodels”, DPG conference Regensburg 2022 – SOE 12.3, Sept 4-9, 2022
Manuel Tonneau, Camille Roth, “Socio-semantic blockmodeling of actors and topic facets: the case of the French politically-enthusiast Twittersphere”, Sunbelt 2022, Cairns, Australia, July 14, 2022
Lena Mangold, Camille Roth, “Partition alignment in socio-semantic multilayer networks”, Sunbelt 2022, Cairns, July 14, 2022
Camille Roth, “Resilience of Socio-Semantic Bubbles”, invited talk, NetGloW 2022, “St-Petersburg” (Online), Jun 22-24, 2022

Camille Roth, “Echo chambers, filter bubbles? It depends.”, MathPlus Workshop, Zuse-Institut Berlin, May 17-18, 2022
Katrin Herms, Jonathan St-Onge, Camille Roth, “An empirical Case Study on Crisis Narratives within Social Media during 2020”, CITAS Conference 2022 on Crisis Narratives and the Pandemic, May 19-21, 2022, Regensburg.
Katrin Herms, Jonathan St-Onge, Camille Roth, “Polarization through interaction in „quotation trees”: an empirical study of micro communication patterns against the background of macro network structures on Twitter”, Networks 2021
Camille Roth, Jonathan St-Onge, Katrin Herms, “Quoting is not Citing: Disentangling Affiliation and Interaction on Twitter”, ComplexNetworks’21, 10th Intl Conf. Complex Network and their Applications, Nov 30-Dec 2, 2021, Madrid, Spain
Darkhan Medeuov, Camille Roth, Kseniia Puzyreva, Nikita Basov, “Concept-centered comparison of semantic networks”, Complex Networks 2020, Dec 1-3, Madrid, Spain.
Telmo Menezes, Camille Roth, “Extracting Conflict Networks from the News with Semantic Hypergraphs”, IC2S2 2020, July 17-20, Amherst, MA, USA.
Camille Roth, Nikita Basov, “The socio-semantic space of John Mohr”, Sunbelt 2020, Paris, July 13-17, 2020.
Camille Roth, Katharina Tittel, Telmo Menezes, “Fragmentation of the Twittersphere surrounding the 2019 EU Elections”, NetGloW 2020, St-Petersburg, July 7-9, 2020.
Telmo Menezes, Camille Roth. “Extracting Conflict Networks from the News with Semantic Hypergraphs”, Sunbelt XL 2020, June 2-7, 2020 Paris.
Jonas Stein, Jérémie Poiroux, Camille Roth, “User confinement on Twitter: where structural and semantic communities intersect”, Sunbelt XL 2020, June 2-7, 2020 Paris
Katharina Tittel, Telmo Menezes, Camille Roth, “Fragmentation of the Twittersphere surrounding the 2019 European Elections”, Sunbelt XL 2020, June 2-7, 2020 Paris
Camille Roth, “Fragmentation in online communities – a joint interactional and informational perspective”, MZES Seminar, Mannheim, Feb 20, 2020.
Camille Roth, roundtable at Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity, Paris, Oct 28, 2019.
Camille Roth, Invited Lecture, “Introduction to the social and cognitive issues of algorithms”, Warm-Up Workshop at IC2S2, University of Amsterdam, Jul 15-20, 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Camille Roth, Podiumsdiskussion, “Digital Challenges : Polarized Public Spheres and Disinformation in European Democracies”, CMB, May 7, 2019.
Camille Roth, Telmo Menezes, “Computational Social Science: online communities, digital public spaces, NLP and SNA”, Workshop on European Digital Society, Mar 21, 2019, European University Viadrina, Francfort/Oder.

WHO WE ARE

The project has hosted various people since it officially started being hosted at CNRS and Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin in 2019. At the end of the project in August 2024, the team involved in socsemics consisted of: