Pragmatic sociology and the digital worlds: towards an alternative laboratory

Francis Chateauraynaud and Josquin Debaz (GSPR – EHESS, Paris)

Read the first part of this text The challenges of a semantic and argumentative approach of corpus in the era of “big data”

The requirement for in-depth description and attentiveness to the details of action and argumentation is a constant driver in pragmatic investigations, which rely on a kind of reflexive accumulation of multiple cases. In our investigations, we have built up a collection of more than 50 corpora representing long run controversies on environmental issues.

This collective work seeks to build a convergence between:

1. the exploration of large documentary networks,
2. the construction of sociological models dealing with the ongoing evolution of actors and arguments,
3. and the critical interpretation of contemporary processes by epistemic communities able to create anew kind of reflexivity on complex processes.
   

By allowing the dynamic interrogation of large evolutionary text databases, a semantic and argumentative approach helps us to redefine the relations between different ways of knowing¹.

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1. Even if socio-Informatics has a particular history linked to the sociology of alerts and controversies, its efficiency has been shown in very different fields, as, among other applications, studies of social representations (Madiot, 2013). [↩]