Professor at Sciences Po Paris, Centre d’Etudes Européennes
Scientific coordinator of the médialab (Joint direction with Bruno Latour)
Dates and Venue:
5 July - 11am – IIT Bombay Industrial Design Centre (IDC)
Talk: How can social sciences be used for products design?
5 July - 4pm - Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
6 July - 10am - Maharashtra Economic Development Council, Mumbai
7 July - 10am - IISER Pune
Talk: How can social sciences be used for products design?
7 July - 4.30pm - Centre for Development Studies and Activities, Pune
8 July - 3pm - SCE Group, Bangalore
9 July - 4pm - Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc Bangalore
Talk: Digital Humanities: how social sciences benefit from the digital revolution
cohosted by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)
Dominique Boullier was trained in sociology (Ph. D in sociology in 1987) as well as in linguistics (master degree in 1990). He completed later an HDR thesis in “information and communication sciences” in 1995. Dominique Boullier was an urban sociology researcher at the University of Rennes during the 80’s and spent one year at UC Berkekey as a visiting scholar, in Manuel Castells’ lab (IURD). His works focused on the public uses of communication technologies. During the 90’s, he created and was the CEO of a consulting firm (Euristic Media), specialized in technical documentation, man-machine interfaces and social uses of ICT in organizations (information systems architecture in hospitals, public transportation and security services).
In 1996, he was appointed as professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne, to act as the head of the on-line master degree he developed (technical writing, documentation management and help systems design). He became director of the social sciences research team, Costech, in 1998, until 2005. The team focused on “cognitive technologies” from various academic fields. During the same period, he spent four years (2000-2004) as a special adviser for the director of the CNRS ICT department, which included a large part of the computer scientists researchers in France. He developed strong relationships between Social Sciences and Computer Science in the very process of technology design. He created and was director of the Lutin User lab from 2004 to 2007 at the largest Science Park in France (Cité des Sciences in Paris). This usability test bed for digital technologies gathered various specialists in cognitive sciences, usability, information design, marketing, semiotics and sociology, contributing to developments projects with the major european companies in ICT (Siemens, Philips, Thomson, Thalès, France Telecom, etc.). For instance, he directed the consortium that developed a test bed for videogames quality, Lutin Game Lab (2006-2008), using fuzzy logic techniques.
In 2005, Dominique Boullier moved to Rennes, in Brittany, his birthplace, where he was elected as professor at the University Rennes 2 and director of the Sociology and Anthropology lab from 2006 to 2009. He set up another user lab called Loustic, including all scholars from 12 institutions interested in interfaces and informational design.
In 2008 he was called for an audit about the digital strategies at Sciences Po where he was hired as full professor in 2009. He is currently a member of the Center for European Studies, a research lab including political scientists, law specialists and sociologists.
Areas of research
His work as the scientific coordinator of the médialab, jointly with Bruno Latour, mostly influenced by the framework of Latour’s famous Actor Network Theory. Dominique Boullier has been a research companion to Bruno Latour for almost 25 years now. The médialab research program includes mapping controversies (with digital collection and display of data), analyzing vast amount of unstructured expressions on the web called the Web conversation (with linguistics engineering techniques), designing topologies of the blogosphere ( with extended models of Kleinberg’s aggregates), development and theory of visualization techniques for navigation among datascapes, modelling (with agent-based models) Tarde’s theory of imitation networks (the famous French sociologist, whom Durkheim managed to make disappear of continental references in sociology). These ways of doing social research are clearly designed as prototypes of the new “digital humanities” that promise to unify qualitative and quantitative methods.
Dominique Boullier conducts research of his own in other fields such as politics of digital architecture (and Internet governance), anthropology of portable digital identities (mobile phone, credit cards and other networked devices that create what he calls an habitele, a new kind of sphere, as P. Sloterdijk would say), anthropology of digital city, digital social networks analysis.
TALK 1 : How Social Sciences can be used for products design?
The various competencies of the user and their analysis by the social sciences
The translation between academic social sciences and operational methods. What is won and what is lost (the case of cognitive science and usability)
The design process and the role played by the communication devices and displays in the coordination and “survival” of user representations (historic case of telephones design)
The big change with internet: the cooperation process of open source software and other forms of direct user contribution: rethinking the whole design process
TALK 2: Digital humanities : How social sciences may benefit from the digital revolution?
Start with an example: the sociology of controversies redesigned by web crawling and visualization techniques.
Traditional use of digital power: database, on line questionnaires, statistic analysis. How are they enhanced by networks, traceability, databases inter-operability.
New uses of digital techniques for exploring digital data: producing datascapes from the huge amount of unstructured expressions on the web and from the traces left by various kinds of behaviour. Examples ranging from conversation analysis of blogosphere for marketing or political topics to modelization of tardian theory.
How can we fill the gap between qualitative and quantitative analysis by using digital networks resources? How can we fill the gap between individual and structure when analyzing a phenomenon through digital lenses?
TALK 3: Cognitive technologies : How digital tools make us smart (or not?)
Introduction
Cognitive anthropology: from Goody to Hutchins, from writing to the cockpit
Four big changes:
• The case of books (and other cultural contents) From conventionally formatted content to short indicial references
• The case of images: From perspective to immersion
• The case of maps: from geography to folkmapping
• The case of metadata: from ontologies to folksonomies
Economy and politics of attention, the scarce resource.
TALK 4 Politics of technology architectures. Digital pluralism
Introduction
The sub-politics (U. Beck) of technology
Code is law (Lessig)
The compass for technical choices. A method to display the pluralism of architectures : historical, political and epistemological
Cases about network architecture (peer-to peer), about navigation tools, about social networks policies
What kind of new governance? Regulation and/or empowerment of users?
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Dominique Bouillier
Centre d’Etudes Européennes
Scientific coordinator of the médialab
(Joint direction with Bruno Latour)
Special adviser for the director on digital strategies
28 rue des Saints Pères
75007 Paris
Office: +33 145497259
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
