Between Computer Science and Semiotics

Studying the Political Web through Data Science
The Techno-methodological Conditions of Analysing a Controversy on Twitter
By Thomas Bottini, Virginie Julliard
English

This paper sets out the method developed in a study that explores the production of Gender during the controversy over “Gender theory”, on Twitter. The method articulates semiotics and computer science to further our understanding of how the techno-editorial properties of this micro-blogging platform influence that production. As a qualitative approach, semiotics has had to revise its methods in the digital social network field due to the complexity, heterogeneity and size of the corpuses. The aim of this paper is to present the foundations of a methodological and technical approach to studying Twitter as a hypermedia platform. After presenting the scientific goals of their research, the authors set out the methodology and tools chosen to reconstruct the semiotic and social context of tweets (e.g. text/image relationship or embedding of a tweet in a network of tweets: conversations, re-tweets, publications of an author, etc.). Finally, they present some of the results that the method yields.

Keywords

  • digital methods
  • equipped semiotics
  • digital social networks
  • API
  • hypermedia corpus
  • gender
  • effects of meaning
  • controversy
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info