‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’ – a digital test of<scp>G</scp>abriel<scp>T</scp>ardes' monads

Latour, Bruno; Jensen, Pablo; Venturini, Tommaso; Grauwin, Sébastian; Boullier, Dominique

doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2012.01428.x

Cited by 331 publications

(292 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Among them, the philosopher and psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels reformulated the former Aristotelian concept by saying that the "whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts" (Ehrenfels, 1937, p. 523). More recently, Bruno Latour revisited that statement claiming that the whole view relies on individual traces (Latour et al, 2012). With respect to the three standpoints, we recognize the importance of both the whole view and the smallest elements.…”

Section: Maps As Instruments Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations

Rodighiero

Kaplan

Beaude

2018

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.

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Scholarly affinities are one of the most fundamental hidden dynamics that drive scientific development. Some affinities are actual, and consequently can be measured through classical academic metrics such as co-authoring. Other affinities are potential, and therefore do not leave visible traces in information systems; for instance, some peers may share interests without actually knowing it. This article illustrates the development of a map of affinities for academic collectives, designed to be relevant to three audiences: the management, the scholars themselves, and the external public. Our case study involves the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of EPFL, hereinafter ENAC. The school consists of around 1,000 scholars, 70 laboratories, and 3 institutes. The actual affinities are modeled using the data available from the information systems reporting publications, teaching, and advising scholars, whereas the potential affinities are addressed through text mining of the publications. The major challenge for designing such a map is to represent the multi-dimensionality and multi-scale nature of the information. The affinities are not limited to the computation of heterogeneous sources of information; they also apply at different scales. The map, thus, shows local affinities inside a given laboratory, as well as global affinities among laboratories. This article presents a graphical grammar to represent affinities. Its effectiveness is illustrated by two actualizations of the design proposal: an interactive online system in which the map can be parameterized, and a large-scale carpet of 250 square meters. In both cases, we discuss how the materiality influences the representation of data, in particular the way key questions could be appropriately addressed considering the three target audiences: the insights gained by the management and their consequences in terms of governance, the understanding of the scholars' own positioning in the academic group in order to foster opportunities for new collaborations and, eventually, the interpretation of the structure from a general public to evaluate the relevance of the tool for external communication.

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Section: Maps As Instruments Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations

Rodighiero

Kaplan

Beaude

2018

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.

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“…The seasonal information and the information fragments around each specific product in EcoFriends provides a, to use Latour et al's words, 'highly specific point of view' on the product and its seasonality [20]. The point of view of a particular user differs from that of all other users, and also dynamically changes along with changes and updates in the social media, information sources, and shopping behaviour that EcoFriends relies upon.…”

Section: Performativity In Interaction Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performativity in sustainable interaction

Normark

Tholander

2014

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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The EcoFriends application was developed as an attempt to support grocery shopping adjusted to vegetables' seasonality through a performative approach to interaction and interactive applications. The design aimed for critical reflection and inspiration among users, rather than achieving a certain kind of persuasion. It guided the practical design to be modelled on playfulness and challenging of ideas. It also allowed us to identify a number of critical issues regarding interactive technology and interaction design, related to aspects of knowledge and truth, trust, and responsibility. We argue that research addressing design for interactions about value-laden concepts such as sustainable action need find ways of supporting various knowledge discourses.

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“…Not integration in the sense of everyone singing in the same key, but integration in the sense that results can speak to each other, even if the underlying conceptions, methods and epistemology varies (cf. Latour et al, 2012;Fischer, 2008). To be sure, such theoretical interoperability is not yet in full evidence, either here or in the discipline as whole (much less across the social sciences), but one of the pleasant outcomes of our focus on computational methods, has been the formation of a set of nascent theoretical ideas about complexity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harmonizing Diversity

Fischer

Lyon

Sosna

et al. 2012

Social Science Computer Review

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The contributions in this issue of Social Science Computer Review represent a range of computational approaches to theoretical and disciplinary specializations in anthropology that reßect on and expand the future orientation and practice of the formal and comparative agenda in the context of an increasing emphasis on complexity in anthropology as a discipline. Themes covered in this issue include kinship, funerary burials, urban legends, eye tracking and looking at mode inßuences on online data collection. A common theme throughout the papers is examining the relationship between global emergent processes and structures and the local individual contributions to this emergence, and how the local and global contexts inßuence each other. We argue that unless complexity is addressed more overtly by leveraging computational approaches to data collection, analysis and theory building, anthropology and social science more generally face an existential challenge if they are to continue to pursue extended Þeld research exercise, intersubjective productions, deep personal involvement, interaction with materiality and engagement with people whilst generating research outcomes of relevance to the world beyond the narrow conÞnes of specialist journals and conferences.

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‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’ – a digital test ofGabrielTardes' monads

Cited by 331 publications

References 28 publications

Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations

Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations

Performativity in sustainable interaction

Harmonizing Diversity

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