Karl M. van Meter

Marlowe, Prospero & la technologie litteraire

Marlowe, Prospero and Literary Technology: An author, an experimenter and a reviewer of the computer programs, Marlowe and Prospero, contribute in this article, respectively and successively, an extensive and detailed presentation of Marlowe, a report on what it is like to interact with Marlowe and a review of the recently-published work, by the first author, describing the development of Prospero for the Analyse of complex dossiers of texts conceming a social controversy, and Prosperos extension and adaptation with Marlowe to direct natural language dialog with researchers concerning specific complex dossiers.

Cartographie du premier congrès de l'ASF avec la méthode des mots associés

The 2004 congress of the French Sociological Association (AFS) included more than 1,000 presentations. Considered as representative of contemporary French sociology, the corpus of abstracts is analyzed with Colliope, a text-analysis computer program based on the associated-words method. A cartography of the entire corpus shows the rather varied themes which are interconnected but also weakly structured. The role of the term WOMAN as attractor, in the sense that it is the link between many different themes. Cartographies of sub-sets of abstracts, grouped together by thematic network (RT), reveal more structured results which remain strongly interconnected. It would be interesting to compare these results with those of other text-analysis approaches which should be done soon.Cartography of the First Congress of the AFS Using the Method of Associated Words: The 2004 congress of the French Sociological Association (AFS) included more than 1,000 presentations. Considered as representative of contemporary French sociology, the corpus of abstracts is analyzed with Colliope, a text-analysis computer program based on the associated-words method. A cartography of the entire corpus shows rather varied themes which are interconnected but weakly structured. The role of the term WOMAN as a pole, in the sense that it is the link between many different themes, stands out. Cartographies of sub-sets of abstracts, grouped together by thematic network (RT), reveal more structured results which remain strongly interconnected. It would be interesting to compare these results with those of other text-analysis approaches which should be done soon.

Cognitive Mapping: The German FORIS Database and Sociological Abstracts’ Aids Research

According to an American diction, “there are as many ways to skin a cat as there are people on earth.” This proposition probably also holds true for “skinning” databases. The British mathematician and writer Lewis Carroll clearly identified the upper limit in “skinning” a database by saying that the “best” map of a terrain is as large as the terrain itself, and indeed is the terrain itself. Somewhere between this “best map” and a simple list of article titles along with author names for articles in a documentary database there are “optimal” solutions such as “cognitive maps” produced by scientometric analysis.

Analysis of deviance and of social classes — the impact of methodological research

In an analysis of deviance and social classes, an original methodology is used as a means of progress in the theoretical domain, which seeks a resolution of the now traditional consensus vs. conflict debate by introducing two hitherto ignored aspects: (1) this debate cannot be clarified by reference to norms or values that are abstractly described, but only in relation to the legitimacy of the intervention of a particular social institution as the result of a particular problematic behavior; and (2) the comprehension of these phenomena and their social interpretation necessitates an understanding of their meaning and of the ideological configurations that are the framework in which these judgements of institutional legitimacy are made. Indeed, this second aspect constitutes the working hypothesis of the analysis, using multiple-choice questionnaire data (N=804) concerning the social representation of deviance which are analyzed by an original method of hierarchically ascending classification analysis, called cross-classification. This method, which crosses an automatic classification analysis of the individuals with a similar analysis of the variables, produces significant nodes within the data that determine and describe the five archetypes of social representation of deviance. These significant nodes or archetypes are then analyzed further with the application of a factorial correspondence analysis.

Managing a Plague: Channelling the ‘Spread’ of AIDS Research

An analysis in Sociological Abstracts of the scientific literature published on AIDS between 1983 and 1990 showed that in the US and the UK the epidemic was politically managed by the Reagan administration and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Sociological research on AIDS in France and Germany, however, did not shy away from the central themes of sexuality and sexual behaviour. The analysis shows as well that two types of author-researchers exist in competition for funding with one another - the ‘heavyweights’ and the ‘artists’. Scientific journals have also been ‘stagemanaged’ with respect to the AIDS epidemic, and few new journals launched during the period, dedicated to AIDS research, are still being published.An analysis in Sociological Abstracts of the scientific literature published on AIDS between 1983 and 1990 showed that in the US and the UK the epidemic was politically managed by the Reagan administration and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Sociological research on AIDS in France and Germany, however, did not shy away from the central themes of sexuality and sexual behaviour. The analysis shows as well that two types of author-researchers exist in competition for funding with one another - the ‘heavyweights’ and the ‘artists’. Scientific journals have also been ‘stagemanaged’ with respect to the AIDS epidemic, and few new journals launched during the period, dedicated to AIDS research, are still being published.