The document discusses the use of digital methods for analyzing online information, including both their benefits and limitations. It provides two examples of digital methods applications: (1) tracking memes and their variants across news articles and blogs, and (2) analyzing trends on Twitter by collecting tweets mentioning trending topics. The conclusion advocates taking advantage of digital methods' access to large, exhaustive digital corpora and network visualizations, while also using qualitative content analysis and observations of actors to build on initial quantitative findings.

1. Le recours aux digital methods
dans l’analyse de l’information en ligne.
Apports et limites.
Franck Rebillard
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Présentation au Social Media Club
Quelle valorisation des social data ? – Mardi 15 mai 2012

2. Mise en contexte
Digitized Methods / Digital Methods (Rogers, 2010)
« A series of volumes and handbooks has now appeared where the
researchers continue to develop quite a classic social scientific
armature, which includes interviews, surveys, observation, and others.
What I would like to point out in particular is these could be categorized
or conceptualized as digitized methods. That is, taking methods —
existing methods— and trying to move them online. » (p. 242)
« What I’d like to try to do —and I think that many of us, in a sense, are
doing this already— is introduce a new era in Internet-related
research where we no longer need to go off-line, or to digitize
method, in order to study the online. Rather, in studying the online,
we make and ground findings about society and culture with the
Internet. Thus, the Internet is a research site where one can
ground findings about reality. With this particular idea, I have
introduced the term digital groundedness, or online
groundedness, where claims about society are grounded in the
online. » (p. 243)
ROGERS R., 2010, « Internet Research : The Question of Method », Journal of Information
Technology and Politics, 7 (2/3), pp. 241-260, [http://www.digitalmethods.net/]

3. Exemple d’application à l’information en ligne (1)
The Dynamics of the News Cycle
(Leskovec et al., 2009)
•« The Meme-tracker technology (http://memetracker.org), [...] analyzes
1.6 million articles and posts each day from a mix of mainstream news
sites, new media sites and blogs. The Meme-tracker algorithm operates
by extracting all quotations that appear in these sources. [...] it then
finds any variants of the original quote that convey the same idea, as
well as similar ideas or phrases that may have come from other people
or been delivered at other times. These elements -- the original quote
and its variants -- are clustered into a “meme” or a concept. »

4. Exemple d’application à l’information en ligne (1)
The Dynamics of the News Cycle
(Leskovec et al., 2009 / Graphique extrait du site
http://memetracker.org/ )

5. Exemple d’application à l’information en ligne (2)
Trends in Social Media
(Asur et al., 2011)
•« Twitter provides a Search API for extracting tweets containing
particular keywords. To obtain the dataset of trends for this study,
we repeatedly used the API in two stages. First, we collected the
trending topics by doing an API query every 20 minutes. Second,
for each trending topic, we used the Search API to collect all the
tweets mentioning this topic over the past 20 minutes. For each
tweet, we collected the author, the text of the tweet and the time it
was posted. Using this procedure for data collection, we obtained
16.32 million tweets on 3361 different topics over a course of 40
days in Sep-Oct 2010. »

6. Exemple d’application à l’information en ligne (2)
Trends in Social Media (Asur et al., 2011, p. 10)

7. Re-mise en contexte
La « nouvelle frontière »
de la « nouvelle science des réseaux »
« Indeed, the sudden emergence of large and reliable network
maps drove the development of network theory during the past
decade. If data of similar detail capturing the dynamics of
processes taking place on networks were to emerge in the
coming years, our imagination will be the only limitation to
progress.
If I dare to make a prediction for the next decade, it is this:
Thanks to the proliferation of the many electronic devices that we
use on a daily basis, from cell phones to Global Positioning
Systems and the Internet, that capture everything from our
communications to our whereabouts, the complex system that
we are most likely to tackle first in a truly quantitative fashion
may not be the cell or the Internet but rather society itself. »
(Barabasi, 2009).

8. Conclusion
Composer avec la « nouvelle science des réseaux »
Profiter des apports des digital methods :
-Corpus numériques de grande envergure, quasi-exhaustifs
-Topologie de l’internet et visualisation graphique
-Traitements automatisés sur de vastes jeux de données
Utiliser ce premier balisage pour ensuite :
-Procéder à des analyses qualitatives de contenu
-Observer les acteurs et leurs pratiques communicationnelles