News Archive
The associational profiler: On co-word analysis as an interface method - Noortje Marres - 19th June
Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths, University of London
4-6pm,
Cowling Room, Social Sciences Building
This presentation will narrate the development of an online tool for social research, provisionally called the Associational Profiler. This experimental tool was produced in collaboration between CSISP (The Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths) and DMI (The Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam). It implements a particular method of textual analysis, co-word analysis, online and adapts it for the analysis of ‘issue dynamics’. Co-word analysis was developed in the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the 1980s to locate 'pockets of innovation' in scientific literatures (Callon et al, 1983). It is today quite widely applied in online research, as the method figures in various applications for real-time analysis, such as Infomous and the Twitter Streamgraph. Our aspiration, in developing the Associational Profiler, was to move beyond the logics and methods materialized in these former tools, in particular their narrow focus on live content rather than on its liveliness. In my presentation, I will discuss whether and how the online implementation of co-word analysis enabled critical and creative engagement with popular online methods. I will do so through an account of the process of tool development as well as the pilot studies we conducted to test it, using Twitter data relating to issues of internet governance.