Our tools : Presentation (abstract)

By Mathieu Jacomy

The principles that rule the Web as a documentary structure today still represent a challenge for scientific knowledge : which form or which organization ? Which are its laws, local or general, permanent or temporary ? Which are its speed and its scenarios of evolution ? How are distributed « informational flows » ? How much « documents » are sheltered there ? Is it regulated by « scales of dynamicity », from « static sites » to « active blogs » ? Which types of correlation, if they exist, between « contents » of the documents and distribution of the hypertext links can one imagine ? As many strategic questions for the researchers of the program Tic-Migrations.

The R&D project of this program aim at conceiving the assumptions, inventing the methods but also training the researchers with new exploratory tools to act in a digital space where we will have succeeded, maybe, to reveal part of the properties. It is initially of a project of « heuristic engineering » or about an engineering of the discovery that questions the forms of a distributed and opened documentary architecture, moving constant.

The mobilization of several theoretical or technical elements is necessary to lead this exploration of the Web : the logical and data-processing formalisms, the statistical data, the methods of text and of dated mining, of architectures of storage and data processing or even the observation of the uses. But it is the production of « forms » or « models » of the Web, all at the same time intellectual and graphic, which constitute our main objective. Thus project rests mainly on the bet of the graphic patterns like powerful instruments of synthesis and handling of « large amount of data », in an open expansion for the researcher but of which it will be necessary to mark out the use and to ensure conventions for the actors to whom certain « cartographic » models could be transferred.