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MetAt - October 8, 2024 logbook

Share our methodological expertise and skills.

Event, Workshop

CEPED, 45 rue des Saints Pères, Paris

NOTA BENE



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 10/08/2024

Location: CEPED

Supervisors: Diego Antolinos Basso, Audrey Baneyx, Maxime Crépel, Béatrice Mazoyer, Eric Opigez, Blazej Palat, Sandra Hamiche.

Natural language processing on United Nations texts

Accompaniment of two academics about the most accurate textual analysis tool in the context of requests on syntactic categories augmented text. First of all, the natural language processing tool TXM was installed. The supervisors then introduced the participants to the query language but also did a review of the available R packages which enable lemmatization.

Europresse data extraction and treatment with Python

Support for college students trying to collect and analyze a big amount of Europresse data. More precisely, they wanted to convert the html from the website to .csv format. In that way, the supervisors suggested the tool Europarser. The students were then guided into the handling of Python’s libraries SpaCy and NLTK, dedicated to natural language processing.

Visualization of Youtube networks

Support of a college student to visualize Youtube channels networks. A methodological discussion was led about Youtube Data Tools and Gephi, tools which can respectively extract data and map them. The supervisors also gave advice about the following of the analysis.

Data storage, codification and development

Support of three PhD students wishing to know some tools for the storage, codification and development of their data (particularly in the case of pictures and videos). The supervisors suggested using Zotero for the storage and codification. Numerous development tools were presented such as Timeline JS, Tesselle which enables the annotation of big pictures corporas in high definition and Khartis, which generates thematic maps. Finally, the PhDs and supervisors discussed the benefits of OCR when it comes to selecting texts in images.

Identification of survey interviewees based on geolocalization data with QGIS

Accompaniment of a student trying to identify which survey interviewees are located next to a railroad. The student had the interviewees coordinates (in a .csv file) and the set of coordinates of the points corresponding to the passage of the railroad (.shp file). The supervisors suggested the use of QGIS software, which can process the data in both formats. Then, using a desired width stamp around the railway line enables the inventory of the set of interviewees in the area around it. Results can be converted into various formats as masks or GPS coordinates. Nevertheless, the data must be correctly merged and identified before the final processing.