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MetAt - September 12, 2023 logbook

Share our methodological expertise and skills.

Event, Workshop

What is METAT?

METAT is a research methods support workshop: every month, a three-hour slot to help you resolve the methodological difficulties you encounter in the course of a scientific project.

Who is METAT for?

METAT is aimed at anyone needing occasional support in using a research tool or method. All profiles are welcome: students, doctoral students, researchers, research engineering professionals and others, inside and outside Sciences Po, with no restrictions on status or affiliation.

How to register?

Registration is compulsory via the form available on the METAT page

Session of 09/12/2023

Location: Sciences Po

Supervisors: Yuma Ando, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Guillaume Plique, Audrey Baneyx, Blazej Palat, Maxime Crépel, Béatrice Mazoyer, Robin de Mourat, Marion Frelat

Creation of a database of articles in .csv format

Accompaniment of a project manager to create a database of articles produced by scientific staff in .csv format, from a website. The first step was to create a list of authors, acting as entities to be found in the text of the exports. The second step was to accompany the participant in creating two scripts to clean up the exports, and a third to detect the presence of named entities in the raw texts. 

Crawling consultancy websites

Second support for a PhD student wishing to build a list of all pages with certain keywords in their titles, and then extract the content of these pages from an existing database of domain names. Support took the form of training in Minet crawling and writing a dedicated crawler to crawl a list of around 500 consulting firm websites. A methodological discussion and training in scraping web page titles and extracting raw textual content was also provided.

Bibliometrics and visualization of bipartite networks

First support for a PhD student wishing to use data from Scopus and Web of Science to visualize co-citation networks or keyword-author networks. The supervisors suggested the use of Table2Net and Scienscape, followed by the visualization tools Nansi and Gephi. Takoyaki and Open refine were also demonstrated to identify related terms and clean up graph nodes more easily. The next steps will be to fine-tune the various phases of the methodology, including the necessary data cleansing, and to take ownership of the ecosystem of tools on offer.

Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data

First support for a doctoral student wishing to build a database of French media articles containing certain keywords. The first stage of the support consisted of a methodological discussion on the number of articles the database should contain, as well as on the definition of keywords and temporality. A protocol was then drawn up and tests carried out on Factiva and Europress. Once a dataset of around 10,000 articles has been built up, the data can be processed on Cortext.