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MetAt - November 14, 2023 logbook

Event, Workshop

Salle K.011, 1 place Saint Thomas d'Aquin 75007 Paris


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 11/14/2023

Location: Sciences Po

Supervisors: Kelly Christensen, Pauline Gourlet, Blazej Palat, Maxime Crépel, Béatrice Mazoyer, Robin de Mourat, Marion Frelat, Diego Antolinos Basso, Anna Charles, Jimena Royo-Letelier, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Guillaume Plique, Antoine Machut, Guillaume Levrier, Matthieu Jacomy 


Methodological explorations

A research engineer from EHESS and a journalist worked with us to identify research methodologies. We began by exploring methods related to webmining, query design, crawling and scraping, followed by a demonstration of various databases and tools (Hyphe, Google bookmarklet, Minet, etc.).

Using Hyphe and web archives 

Support for a student who wanted to study the evolution of the Association des Jeunes Chinois de France website since its creation, and in particular the list of sites to which it has links over time. Hyphe was used to crawl the site on the live web, and web.archive for each year since 2011. The lists of sites discovered were exported and the data was assembled using a Python script, so that the evolution could simply be viewed in a spreadsheet file.

Collecting data on Google Street View

A working group of five research engineers and designers was set up with the aim of collecting POI data from Google Street View and carrying out automated image analysis (object/text detection). Numerous options were explored, including collecting data from GPS coordinates in CSV format or from various APIs. An effective method for collecting photos extracted from Google Street View has been found, which implements Google Street View static API functionality. Approaches for analysing the content of photos were also discussed, in particular those derived from the Google vision API. Other avenues remain to be explored, including scraping from views available on Google Street View.

Twitter data analysis 

The participant, a doctoral student in international relations at Sciences Po, wanted support in analysing the content of tweets from France diplomatie's international account and the English-language press, in order to detect the influence of Twitter (X) on the press. The supervisors provided an in-depth methodological reflection on the importance of defining precise hypotheses before analysing the data. At the end of the session, it was suggested that the research should begin with a campaign of semi-directed qualitative interviews in order to find the relevant signal to follow in the social networks, before redefining the collection and analysis of the Twitter data.