Nine years after signing the agreement to launch EquipEx DIME-SHS, the cutting-edge research infrastructure program for SHS is nearing its conclusion. This milestone will be ratified on January 14, 2021, in the presence of all the project partners and representatives of the French National Research Agency.

This meeting will provide an opportunity to take stock of the project’s many achievements. Twenty full corpora of qualitative surveys have been made available and can be browsed, as well as more than 70 surveys from the Elipss panel. Numerous computer applications have also been developed, from web crawlers such as “hyphe” to an online panel management tool. However, the balance sheet goes far beyond these achievements, with the implementation of infrastructures that will have an impact beyond the end of the early funding.

This final meeting will also be an excellent opportunity to thank the personnel who were involved throughout the course of the project, the ANR for the outstanding support they provided, and the partner institutions and supervisors for their continued involvement in the project. A special tribute will also be dedicated to the initial project leaders, in particular Laurent Lesnard, who was the Scientific and Technical Manager of DIME-SHS from 2012 to 2017. Finally, because a research network is nothing without those with whom and for whom it is built, the participants and users of the network will of course be at the heart of the talks!

The imminent end of funding for DIME-SHS is an opportunity to finalize a certain number of developments. Some of the developments concerning the Dime Web instrument have been underway for many months on its main open source software, in order to perpetuate the work accomplished and stabilize the tools and their use beyond the lifespan of the Equipex.

Three major new releases have been published in the last few days for Hyphe, Hyphe-Browser and Gazouilloire, and will be presented on February 6, 2021 at the FOSDEM international open source software conference in the Open Research Tools & Technologies room.

The life of these tools does not end with Equipex, and the software will continue to be supported and improved in the future by the engineering team of the médialab at Sciences Po.

Gazouilloire v1.0

Dime Web has developed the Gazouilloire software to allow the implementation of a longitudinal follow-up of Twitter over several months or years. Nearly 7 years after the development of its first prototype and the collection of several hundred million tweets for numerous research projects, Gazouilloire has reached its maturity with its version 1.0!

In addition to being very easy to use for developers with an [installation and configuration that only takes a few minutes, this new version aims, above all, to sustain and stabilize the tool thanks to its upgrade to python3 (the current standard version of the language) and to simplify the handling, exploration and analysis of the large corpuses collected (thanks to the switch to the ElasticSearch data storage and indexing technology).

Hyphe-Browser v2.0 & Hyphe v1.4

Since the release of its first full version in 2017, the web-crawling software for social sciences Hyphe has continued to develop on a regular basis with numerous bug fixes reported by users, but also with the addition of new options, features and settings available with Hyphe v1.4.

As announced in the DIME-SHS 2018 action plan, one of the challenges for Hyphe prior to the end of EquipEx was to facilitate its deployment in order to allow researchers to quickly access the tool, for a more or less short period of time, by making a financial contribution. This objective was achieved thanks to the implementation within Hyphe Browser of the possibility, when choosing the Hyphe server to connect to, of deploying a new server at a cloud host (OVH, CityCloud or VexxHost) at the user’s expense in a few clicks, without having to call on the Dime Web team.

The Hyphe Browser complementary software allows users to browse the web while building its corpus with Hyphe; it also allows users to categorize its actors while visiting their web pages. It has been funded by IDEFI FORCCAST in order to train students to use the web in social sciences as part of their controversy analysis courses. In addition to the option of deploying Hyphe instances on the cloud, its brand new version 2.0 has been completely redesigned, after considering the observations of users’ experiences to make its use much more intuitive. Finally, this redesign has made the tool much more stable and fast, and has enriched it with many new features that will undoubtedly prove very useful for future research projects.

The Sociological Observatory of Change (OSC) and the CDSP are mobilizing to study, through the prism of social inequalities, the impact of social distancing and the lockdown measures put in place by the government. Based on the extensive data collected within the framework of the probability-based ELIPSS panel, the “Coping with Covid-19” project will study the evolution of the practices and attitudes of the population by administering a series of surveys specific to Covid-19 during the period of crisis.

The CoCo Project: Coping with Covid-19

Coordinated by Ettore Recchi (CSO), Coping with Covid-19 / Faire face au Covid-19 (Coco) is a research project aimed at assessing, with regard to social inequalities, the social effects of the epidemic in France. Thanks to an original method-based approach (mixing quantitative longitudinal data, personal diaries, focus groups and individual interviews), CoCo proposes to analyze a wide range of indicators over time (socio-economic, socio-psychological and socio-political), in order to highlight the disruption of daily activities resulting from the rules of the lockdown.

The ELIPSS contribution

The quantitative part of the project is based on extensive data from the ELIPSS panel, which has been compiled on a regular basis since 2012. From April 2020, five new rounds of surveys will be administered to the ELIPSS panel to cover different phases of the Covid-19 crisis, and to monitor changes in social habits, household structures, life plans, mental health conditions or socio-political attitudes. This approach will therefore make it possible to systematically record and assess the impact of the epidemic on attitudes and behavior over time.

The software engineering endeavours supporting the DIME-SHS instruments occasioned valuable skills acquisitions, regarding online panel and device fleet management. This expertise drew the attention of the European Social Survey (ESS ERIC) at the time prospecting resources to implement the software infrastructure to support its web panel “Opinion Study for Europe”.

Hence, singled out to partner with the ESS ERIC, Sciences Po contributes to the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud SSHOC (Social Sciences Humanities Open Cloud) project that endeavours to make accessible through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) services and resources provided to the SSH scientific community by european research infrastructures. Specifically, the CDSP partakes in the Innovations in data production work package by developing a sample management web service suited to european-scale online surveys. The CDSP is also involved in the first survey project to take advantage of the new infrastructure (ESS-SUSTAIN-2).

An initial version of the application, covering the functional scope outlined in the first project deliverable, will be released in december 2020 with access limited to users in charge of testing during the course of january 2021. The application will consecutively find its first use case in the “Opinion Studies” web survey series covering 12 european countries.

To attend new users, an online documentation is supplied and will be complemented by a live training session directed to ESS-SUSTAIN-2 actors, including ESS national coordinators.

The book “Un panel Français. L’Étude longitudinale par internet pour les sciences sociales (ELIPSS)”, a collaborative effort initiated in 2018 with a call for contributions from the data users of the DIME Quanti system, will be published by INED. It will appear in the Grandes enquêtes collection alongside other social science reference works. Featuring contributions from some thirty authors, the coordinators of the book,

Emmanuelle Duwez and Pierre Mercklé, present the work carried out on twelve datasets produced and disseminated within the framework of ELIPSS. The ambition of this book is twofold: to contribute to knowledge in many areas of social life while questioning the way in which this knowledge is produced.

Three main objectives of the project serve as the outline of the manuscript. Following a chapter that describes how the ELIPSS panel was set up, the first part of the book, entitled “Confronting: data to renew the analysis of the social space”, highlights the longitudinal nature of the system and thus the interest of being able to cross-reference a considerable amount of available data. The contributions of the second part, “Comparing: family, justice and health through the prism of different demographics”, focus on the comparability of the data produced in this way. Finally, the last section, “Exploring: new methodologies and new questions”, presents some new surveys that have been created thanks to the ELIPSS panel. The book is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2021.

In October 2019, BeQuali participated in the organization and management of the Action Nationale de Formation (ANF) “Quali-SHS, Analysing and re-analyzing qualitative data in social sciences”.

This training, co-financed by the CNRS InSHS, the TGIR PROGEDO, and the MATE-SHS business network, and also supported by the CDSP, mobilized 38 trainees and 13 trainers from October 6th to October 11th. Two members of the beQuali team who were involved in the steering committee of the ANF, were also in charge of the management of four training modules dedicated to reanalysis tools.

Data from the survey « From Africa to France, from one generation to the next” (coordinated by Jacques Barou) and made available by beQuali, served as a guide for choosing the various case studies used in the different workshop sessions, thus putting the Dime-SHS results at the heart of the training.

** Because of the social protest movements and the transport situation, the organising team for the DIME-SHS closing conference has decided to postpone the event to a later date. See you in 2020 to talk about DIME-SHS! **

Implemented as a result of the development plan for the excellence infrastructures, at this year-end 2019, DIME-SHS* turns the page on 10 years of funding for the Equipex programme. A crucial stage in the life-cycle of an infrastructure, the end of funding is not only an opportunity to look back on what has been achieved and to consider the prospects ahead, but also to develop a joint perspective on the role and function of this type of infrastructure in the national and European research landscape. This conference represents that twofold ambition: to tell the story and consider the future of a social science research infrastructure, but also to debate the purpose and funding of this type of experiment.

December 12th

9h-9h30 : accueil café

9h30 - 10h30 : ouverture institutionnelle

• Frédéric Mion (Sciences Po)
  
• Nicolas Sauger (Sciences Po CDSP, CNRS),
  
• Magda Tomasini (Ined).

10.45 - 12.15pm : Panel on “the funding of research infrastructures”

The question of finance is often central to the day-to-day preoccupations of research infrastructures. Support for investment, self-funding, institutional partnerships, are all possible and potentially complementary solutions. This round table will look both at the different methods of funding infrastructures, and at their consequences for the activities that those methods are employed to develop. The experience of the DIME-SHS programme and of the quest to maintain it in the future can be a touchstone for these discussions.

Panel of speakers
- Marie d’Arcimoles (Sciences Po CDSP),
- Fabrice Boudjaaba (CNRS INSHS),
- Alain Chenu (Sciences Po OSC),
- Christine Musselin (Sciences Po CSO),
- Carthage Smith (OCDE).

2 - 3.30pm : Round table on “Producing with 4 hands: skills in a research infrastructure”

Infrastructures are a primary meeting point for different skills and roles. The aim of this round table is to explore these encounters, notably in a dialogue between service providers, platform engineers and users. From understanding the project to managing constraints and timetables, the example of DIME-SHS is once again a prism through which to view both the fruitfulness and the difficulties of these encounters and work collaborations.

Panel of speakers
- Damien Cartron (CNRS CMH),
- Guillaume Garcia (Sciences Po CDSP, CNRS),
- Anne Gotman (CNRS Cerlis),
- Agathe Grandval (RNM-GP),
- Emeline Juillard (Sciences Po CDSP, CNRS),
- Mathieu Olivier (Sciences Po CDSP, CNRS),
- Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou (Sciences Po médialab),
- Donato Ricci (Sciences Po médialab).

4 - 5.30pm : “DIME-SHS Panel: an infrastructure in development”

This panel concludes the day with a more direct discussion of the achievements and prospects of DIME-SHS. How to understand the changes in a project that has been developing for 10 years? What lessons can be learned to build the future of this research infrastructure? It is also an opportunity to think about future needs in terms of social science infrastructure for the coming decade.

Panel of speakers
- Dominique Joye (Université de Lausanne FORS),
- Nicolas Sauger (Sciences Po CDSP),
- Roxane Silberman (CNRS CMH),
- Vincent Tiberj (Sciences Po Bordeaux).

December 13th

On the sidelines of the symposium, two method workshops focusing on the contextualisation, dissemination and reuse of qualitative and quantitative data were also schedule:

“Metadata Management” workshop Programme

“Resources for the Teaching of Methods” workshop Programme

In September 2019, the DIME-SHS project was granted an additional year to complete the current projects and consolidate the sustainability efforts undertaken in the previous period.

This extension will enable the ELIPSS panel (an operation co-financed by the USPC) to be renewed. It will also guarantee the continuity and quality of the reception given to the panelists most recently integrated into the system, as well as ensuring the transformation of the hyphe application developed by DIME-Web as a “software as a service”.

Nevertheless, the year 2019 marks an important milestone as the EquipEx draws to a close. Two events illustrate this: between June and December, nine colleagues finished their fixed-term contracts; in June, the cell phone contract, under which for almost eight years ELIPSS panelists were each provided with a tablet and a 4G subscription to answer online surveys administered by the DIME-Quanti team, also ended.

After awarding its label in June 2010, and give grant of nearly € 500k in 2015 as part of its action program “Plateformes, infrastructures et équipements de recherche”, USPC reiterates its support to the Equipex DIME-SHS at the end of 2018 by a new subsidy of € 86.4k for investments for the future.

Thereby, USPC confirms its recognition of the structuring nature of the instruments made available to the scientific community since the installation of Equipex in 2011.

In addition to other sources of funding, this grant will constitute in 2019 an essential contribution to initiate actions to maintain the existing ELIPSS survey service beyond the Equipex ending.

It will notably be used to co-finance the renewal of the panel’s sample, with a view to pursuing the excellence requirement that has characterized the project since its inception.

The 2018 edition of the International Conference on Web Studies, part of the Digital Tools & Uses Congress, was held at the MSH Paris in Saint Denis from the 3rd to the 5th of October in 2018. The Dime Web team had been invited by the organizers to present a keynote of its work on hypertext links, and in particular Hyphe, its open source web-crawling software for social sciences.

It was an opportunity for the team to do an in depth review of its approach to web studies in the social sciences, focusing on hyperlinks and web page crawling. As a matter of fact, at a time when a certain number of academics are choosing to abandon this field in favor of the analysis of social networks and their data (which are often much easier to collect through APIs), it would seem appropriate to question the relevance of continuing along this more complex path. Entitled “ The Hyperlink is not dead “, the talk ultimately answered this question negatively.

Following a quick historical review of the origins of the web, the hypertext link and the intentions of its creators and users, Dime Web’s own approach of exploiting the web as a field of investigation was presented. It was done most notably with the help of Hyphe, and the many original angles of analysis derived from it for analyzing controversies, the community dynamics of polarization between oppositions and affinities, or the effects of hierarchies caused by the directionality of the link, which Robert K. had anticipated as early as the 1960s. Merton and his “Matthew effect”. You can find the presentation accompanying this keynote online.

Since each presentation is accompanied by a publication reviewed and published during the conference, the presentation was also an opportunity to produce a new methodological publication that users of the tool can reference in their work. Published in open access, it is available on this link.

The conference was also an opportunity to meet people who had used Dime Web tools without having solicited help from the team first. For example, Orélie Desfriches-Doria has presented the work she and her team had carried out with the help of Hyphe: “What is Digital Humanities’ identity in interdisciplinary practices? An experiment with digital tools for visualizing the francophone DH network”. Further evidence of the interest of an Open Science approach in order to maximize the uses and foster the emergence of new research work.

On September 27, on the sidelines of the scientific symposium itself, DIME-SHS’s “public meeting” this year took the new form of a dialogue between the Equipex structures (joint meeting of the scientific board and the Scientific and technical committees of each of the three instruments).

This was an opportunity not only to take stock of the action is already underway and to present the operations planned up to the closure of the project, but also for an open discussion about the prospects for the long-term future of the ELIPSS, beQuali and Dime Web instruments after 2019.

This half day Forum closed with a session dedicated to the experiences of researchers-users of the DIME-SHS instruments - for ELIPSS, Florent Gougou on the Dynamics of Mobilisation (Dynamob) survey and for beQuali, Olivier Rozenberg on the “The French Parliament and the European Union” survey. These presentations both cast light on the essential contributions of the instruments to the practice of research, and on the difficulties that users have experienced, thereby opening lines of thought for the future.

Achievements and prospects of the instruments

beQuali

10 surveys already available; 7 additional surveys scheduled by the end of 2019; provision of methodological tools (filing plan, zotéro library, etc.); roll-out of new teaching kits to facilitate reuse by educators.

ELIPSS

45 datasets already disseminated to the research community; collection and dissemination of some 20 additional datasets by the end of 2019; ongoing preparation of a collective publication dedicated to the ELIPSS experience; active quest for partnerships and development of a new business model to guarantee the continuation of ELIPSS after the end of the Equipex programme.

Dime web

22 research projects already supported; version 3 of the hyphe crawler made available online (August 2018); prospect of automated rollout in the cloud an introduction of an online payment tool by the end of 2019.

For the September 28th, 2018 conference entitled “Tools to conduct research in Social Sciences”, DIME-SHS is publishing its new website, and reaching out to an international audience, with content entirely available in English.

On this website, you can find presentations about the ELIPSS, beQuali and Dime Web tools, as well as a list of productions from EquipEx.

Since 2011, the Equipex DIME-SMS¹ team has innovated to establish new research tools. After operating for 7 years, it has now begun the last step of its cycle.

On September 28th, 2018, the DIME-SHS conference entitled “Tools to conduct research in Social Sciences” will make sharing analyses and results from equipment-tools data possible.

Programme

9h30 - 10h00 / Introductory lecture

Replication, reuse and crossing of the corpus : challenges and opportunities for DIME-SHS - Nicolas Sauger, DIME-SHS scientific director, CDSP director)

10h00 - 10h45 / Co-producing data for research with ELIPSS

Daily national mobility panel : first results of a longitudinal survey - first wave - Thomas Buhler, lecturer at the University of Franche-Comté - Philippe Signoret, research engineer at the University of Franche-Comté Understanding the representation of territorial networks : GlobalMap, first results and methodology - Claude Grasland, Professor at the University Paris Diderot - Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau, Professor at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

11h00 - 11h45 / Reuse qualitative datas for research and teaching

Reuse qualitative datas to study the “European integration paradox” : - Anja Thomas, associated PhD at CERI Teaching with pre-existing qualitative datas - Christophe Giraud, Professor at the University of Paris Descartes

11h45 - 12h30 / Tools and digital methods to apprehend the Web as a survey field

Using Hyphe in social sciences - Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, research engineer at Médialab, and Manager of the Dime Web tool Controverses tools regarding vaccines - Jérémy Ward, research associate at LIED PIERI and research engineer at ORS-PACA - Paul Guille-Escuret, PhD student at the University Paris Sorbonne - Florian Cafiero, associate researcher at l’Ecole des Chartes

14h00 - 15h30 / Panel discussion “Open data and privacy”, moderated by Guillaume Garcia (CDSP research engineer and beQuali team Manager) and Mathieu Jacomy (former Dime Web research engineer)

• Claire Levallois Barthes, Law lecturer at Télécom ParisTech, ‘Values and Personal Data Policy chair’ coordinator
• Daniel Bizeul, associate researcher at Crespaa-CSU and Professor at the University of Angers
• Céline Alazard, archivist and “Archives, Documentation, Digitization” technological platform manager at the University of Bourgogne
• Emilie Masson, legal expert and member of the Computing and freedom correspondent team at the CNRS

15h45 - 17h15 / panel discussion “textual analysis as a back-up for data mining”, moderated by Jean-Philippe Cointet (researcher at Sciences Po’s Médialab)

• Dominique Labbé, associate researcher at PACTE
• Maxime Crépel, research engineer at Medialab, and Diego Antolinos-Basso, data-mining developer at CEVIPOF
• Florent Gougou, lecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble, and researcher at PACTE

Public

The DIME-SHS conference entitled “Tools to conduct research in Social Sciences” aims to reach a large audience amongst those who use social sciences data :
- Researchers and professors - Researchers, users, people interested in and curious about DIME-SHS tools and the data they produce (research teams, professors etc.), - engineers specialized in production, information processing, analysis and representation of Social and Human Sciences research data, - students who wish to engage in research, - PhD students interested in data analysis methods, - multidisciplinary project developers, - Data-use training manager.

Practical informations

The DIME-SHS conference “Tools to conduct research in Social Sciences” is free and open to all after registration. You can sign up here.

The DIME-SHS conference “Tools to conduct research in Social Sciences” will be held at the Société Nationale d’Horticulture de France, at 84 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris

Initiated in 2011, Equipex DIME-SHS was evaluated by an international and independent jury, which recognized the “impressive” results achieved after 7 years of existence.

EquipEx, which is supposed to come to an end on 2019, has been able to achieve most of its scheduled investments, thus reaching a cruising speed :

1. The BeQuali database now gathers hundreds of interviews
2. A panel of about 3000 people is interviewed every month for the ELIPSS tool, thus forming a catalogue of more than 50 surveys
3. A new version of the Hyphe software was delivered by Dime Web, for an easier installment and higher performance.

At the end of 2017, the teams are fully operating. In addition to the operational coordination hub, 15 engineers funded thanks to the ANR, develop, maintain and make the tools function, alongside permanent staff also working on the project.

For the first two years, in accordance with the 2018-2019 action plan given to the ANR, the efforts will focus on actions that provide value to the data made available since the launch of Equipex (especially with two scientific events scheduled), and on the execution of the elements that can insure a perpetuation of the tools.

After a change in the executive branch of the Center for Social and Political Data, DIME-SMS will be welcoming next fall 2017 a new scientific manager.

After suggesting and carrying out the development of the DIME-SHS project, Laurent Lesnard, a sociologist, will be replaced by Nicolas Sauger, a political scientist.

DIME-SHS teams were invited on December 12 and 13, 2016 at “the CDSP’s 10-year anniversary” to hold several workshops on Equipex’ most prominent tools : case studies, feedback sessions, testimonies and demos. Six sessions that were entirely dedicated to the beQuali, ELIPSS and Dime Web tools.

The CNRS President and the Institute of human and social sciences Director just awarded the 2015 cristal medal to Anne Cornilleau and Anne-Sophie Cousteaux - qualitative teams coordinators at the CDSP - and to Geneviève Michaud - IT team coordinator at the CDSP.

Those medals are a token of appreciation from the CNRS for their commitment and the excellent work they achieved since 2005 at the CDSP, and since 2011 as members of the DIME-SHS Equipex team. Those awards also illustrate the important role engineers, who work side by side with researchers, have in research.

In order to insure the launch of Equipex, an important wave of recrutement was initiated, from the beginning of the project.

At the end of the pilot phase (2011-2012), 2 developers and 8 engineers dedicated to Quali(2), Quanti (4) and Web (2) instruments joined the initial coordination team, thus bringing DIME-SHS staff number to 16.

Right before the development of Equipex, other recrutements will be made in 2013 and 2014 to guarantee a good expansion of the facilities that were already tested

On January 27, 2012, the CDSP organized a launch day for its Equipex DIME-SHS. This event was held in the presence of Richard Descoing, administrator of the National Foundation of political science, and Laurent Lesnard, project leader. Equipex was presented to the academic community.