Initiated in 2004, the RICardo project focuses on bilateral trade data of all the world's countries from the early nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. The project includes the construction of a database and the creation of a website. It is a pioneering work in the field of historical trade statistics that aims at providing easy-to-access research material to the scientific community and at attracting a wider public to the history of trade relationships. The paper emphasizes the originality of our project and sums up its various aspects by reviewing previous trade databases, clarifying the main features of historical trade statistics, and describing the construction and use of the RICardo website.
The emergence and success of web platforms nurtured a trend within social studies: "Hyperlink is dead!". Capturing their users into mobile applications and specialised web interface to propose them a specific user experience (and business model), the platforms indeed created new information silos in the open World Wide Web space. The simplified availability of user behavioural data through these platforms APIs reinforced this idea in academic communities by providing scholars with an easy way to collect rich user centric data for their research. After discussing the methodological aspects of the web divide between platforms and classical websites, we will argue that although it becomes more and more invisible, the hyperlink, modern incarnation of intertextual links between documents, is still a central and structural element of the web. Hyperlinks remain an invaluable resource to turn the web into a research field in spite of the complexity to collect, manipulate and curate them. We will illustrate those methodological challenges by describing the choices we made in designing Hyphe, a tool dedicated to the creation of web corpora tailored for mining hypertexts. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Web mining; Web applications; Internet communications tools;
The web is a field of investigation for social sciences, and platform-based studies have long proven their relevance. However the generic web is rarely studied in itself though it contains crucial aspects of the embodiment of social actors: personal blogs, institutional websites, hobby-specific media… We realized that some sociologists see existing web crawlers as “black boxes” unsuitable for research though they are willing to study the broad web. In this paper we present Hyphe, a crawler developed with and for social scientists, with an innovative “curation-oriented” approach. We expose the problems of using web-mining techniques in social science research and how to overcome those by specific features such as step-by-step corpus building and a memory structure allowing researchers to redefine dynamically the granularity of their “web entities”.
Boltanski s'appuie sur une représentation tabulaire des champs sociaux pour montrer que la classe dominante se caractérise avant tout par sa multipositionnalité, c'est-à-dire par la tendance de ses membres à occuper plusieurs positions dans plusieurs champs. En remplaçant le tableau de Boltanski par un graphe d'individus et d'institutions, nous discuterons les caractéristiques et les avantages d'une sociologie de réseaux hétérogènes.
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