Sylvain Laurens

Traiter des « masses » de données prosopographiques par la numérisation d’annuaires - Espoirs et vertiges

Treating “Masses” of Prosopographical Data by Scanning Directories - Hopes and Disorientation: This note aims to provide an update on the progress made in optical character recognition (OCR) and the contribution of these techniques to the creation of prosopographical data bases in social sciences. With the example of a European investigation of European business associations, it highlights the progress made possible by OCR with the analysis of several biographical directories identifying groups of business interests. Based on this example, it is hypothesized that the development of digital technologies allow the creation of corpuses of data much larger than in the past in the framework of quantitative inquiries conducted by smaller teams. However, this article also highlights the fact that this extension of corpuses – made possible by scanning – raises new problems of method, starting with the increased time devoted to the standardization of digital data.

Apprendre à travailler: The uneasy journey of counter-school culture in the country of cultural capital theory

This paper retraces the journey of Learning to Labour in the French intellectual landscape, by examining the context in which we had this book translated in 2011. We first analyse the slow importation of Willis’s research in France (the originality of the counter-school culture concept is highlighted in light of Bourdieu’s theoretical emphasis on the role of cultural capital in social reproduction) and the conditions that made a French translation possible 30 years after the original’s publication. We then discuss the ways in which this 2011 translation, entitled L’école des ouvriers, collided with French debates on the role of school and the then prevalent postmodern theories. We end by discussing the uses of Willis’s work in contemporary French sociology.