3. For agency to be expressed and consequences
produced,
actions need to
(1)involve several actors (acting as collecting);
(2)whose contributions must be coordinated (acting as
aligning);
(3)by bending their trajectories (acting as detouring);
(4)and redefining their identities (acting as being).
4 felicity conditions of actions
4. Law, J., & Callon, M. (1992). The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network
Analysis of Technical Change. In W. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping
Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 21–52).
MIT Press.
(1) Acting as collecting
5. Latour, B. (1995). The “Pédofil” of Boa Vista: a Photo-Philosophical
Montage.
Common Knowledge, 4(1), 144–187.
(2) Acting as aligning
6. Latour, B. (1995). The “Pédofil” of Boa Vista: a Photo-Philosophical
Montage.
Common Knowledge, 4(1), 144–187.
(2) Acting as aligning
7. (3) Acting as detouring
Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication
of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power,
action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196–223). London:
Routledge.
8. Kohler, R. E. (1994). Lords of the Fly. Drosophila Genetics and the
Experimental Life.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
(4) Acting as being
Drosophil
a
Fly
Group
Standard
Organism
Chromosome
Mapping
9. “Relativism is not the relativity of truth, but the truth of
relation”
Deleuze, G. (1988). Le pli : Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
(4) Acting as being
10. ANT is not a theory of actors and networks,
but a theory of actors as networks and of networks
as actors
Actions are unities
units and unions
(actors and networks)
Actor=Network Theory
not Actor+Network Theory
11. A pragmatic stance:
gains and losses
Shifting the focus from essence to action
purposely neglect the general differences between
• human/non-human actors
• individual/collective actors
in order to observe:
1. the interferences between actors of different type
2. other more specific differences
17. Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., Baneyx, A., & Girard, P. (forthcoming)
Hors champs: la multipositionnalité par l’analyse des réseaux,
Reseaux
Individual and collective
and other differences
18. social structures VS repetition and
Collective tendencies have an existence of
their own; they are forces as real as
cosmic forces, albeit of another sort; they
too affect the individual from without,
albeit through other channels. The proof
that the reality of collective tendencies is
no less than that of cosmic forces, is that
this reality is demonstrated in the same
way, namely by the uniformity of effects.
Durkheim, E. (1897). Le Suicide.
A social thing [...] devolves and passes on, not
from the social group collectively to the
individual, but rather from one individual […] to
another individual, and that, in the passage of
one mind into another mind, it is refracted. The
sum of these refractions, from the initial impulse
of an inventor, a discoverer, an innovator or
modifier [...] is the entire reality of a social thing
at a given moment; a reality which is constantly
changing, just like any other reality, through
imperceptible nuances.
Tarde, G. (1995). Les Deux éléments de la
sociologie
19. Individual and collective
interferences
Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012).
“The whole is always smaller than its parts”: a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads.
The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 590–615.
Venturini, T., Jensen, P., & Latour, B. (2015). Fill in the Gap: A New Alliance for Social and
Natural Sciences. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(2), 11.
21. Situations of structural change or revolutions, e.g.
• moments in which a new species transforms an ecological
environment
(Levins, 1968; Gordon, 2011);
• an innovation ‘creatively destroy’ an industrial market
(Schumpeter, 1976);
• a compromise is proposed to defuse with a social crisis
(Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2009).
Demand to shift our focus
from the distinction between local interactions and global
structures
to interactions between things changing quickly and things
changing slowly
Collective changes
22. A spatial framing
of collective change
Disadvantages of misusing the micro/macro framing
• Binary, micro and macro attractors vacuums
graduations of speed between them
• Rigid, entities cannot change tempo
(they are either movable actors or fixed structures)
• Topological, implicit assumption that
local changes faster than global
Venturini, T. (2018). The Fish Tank Complex of Social Modelling.
In M. Nagatsu & A. Ruzzene (Eds.), Frontiers of Social Science: A Philosophical Reflection
(forthcoming). New York: Bloomsbury.
27. Studying change in Wikipedia
Viegas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & Van Ham, F. (2007).
Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia.
In 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
http://hint.fm/projects/historyflow
28. Studying change in Wikipedia
Borra E., Weltevrede E., Ciuccarelli P., Kaltenbrunner A. ... Venturini T. (2015)
Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
www.contropedia.net/demo
33. One Flat Thing, reproduced
1. Shifts the attention
• away from the distinction between local interaction and global
structures (the micro/macro divide)...
• ... to the processes of slowing down and speeding up; .
2. Captures
• Repetition and variation
Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l'imitation, 1890
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition, 1968
• Sequence (before and after) and coordination (at the same
time)
3. Visualizes change by
• Augmentation instead of aggregation
• View change by changing views
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
Par conséquent, mon travail sur l’analyse visuelle des réseaux à produit
1. des publications en sciences sociales (reprise d’une analyse de Luc Boltanski de la classe dominante française, en remplaçant ses tableaux avec des réseaux)
and the metaphor that is recurrently used is that of ants and ants’ nest
Ants are presented as social insects capable of building large and complex global structures (such as their nest) while processing information only at a local scale (through the chemical pheromones that they leave and encounters).
Through the expedient of time-lapse (the acceleration speed at which he shows us the image of the reef), the great British documentarist David Attenborough remind us that the corals are are not a static background for the interactions of the fishes, they not minerals or plant, but animals that move, hunt and fight.
The same is true for social institutions: they are not given once and for all. They change and sometime they can change as quickly as the interactions that they host.
And as soon as we consider the situation of structural change where old institutions dissolve and new arrangements crystallize, the micro-macro become untenable and we are forced to shift our attention - from the distinction between local interactions and global structures- to the interaction between things changing quickly and things changing slowly
To be sure, the micro/macro framing has many advantages. In collective life, not everything changes at the same time and it is often convenient to take some things as settled, in order to highlight faster transformations.
This simplification, however, is only useful as long as we use it for what it is: precisely a simplification that we employ (for the sake of simplicity) to disregard (momentarily) some of the slower changes.
But convenient as it is the micro/macro framing should never be reified, because its reification has several disadvantages both from a conceptual and a methodological point of view.
When reified the micro/macro divide traps our understanding of social phenomena in a completely artificial framing, in which actors move against a static background, like fishes in a plastic aquarium. The oceans of collective life are much richer and more interesting.
3 BBC Blue Planet Ep6 Coral CUT.mp4
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).
When reified the micro/macro divide traps our understanding of social phenomena in a completely artificial framing, in which actors move against a static background, like fishes in a plastic aquarium. The oceans of collective life are much richer and more interesting.
3 BBC Blue Planet Ep6 Coral CUT.mp4
Here is another example of a very influent project that focused directly on time.
This project inspired another project to which I contributed and that has been spearheaded by Eric Borra and Esther Weltevrede here at the Digital Methods Initiative
And here is a similar project that we developed at the médialab on the amendments of French laws.
And finally a project by Ben Fry to visualize the different versions of Charles Darwin’s book on “The Origin of Species”.
What these three projects have in common is their effort to produce a sort of visual versioning of collective phenomena. And what is interesting about this versioning approach is that it begins to distance itself from the traditional logic of the micro/macro divide.
But these three projects still have significant limitations:
In the fact that they are still incapable to handle radical structural change (ex. when laws a passed that change the way in which laws are passed)
In the fact that they still heavily rely on topological visualization (but see the experimental visualization of the network of amendments co-signature)
But I have found a project that goes even further in respecting the temporal nature of collective phenomena, while subjecting them to a formal description
For (remember!) our problem is to model collective change, not just narrate it.
It’s a project from Ohio State University and it aims at formalizing a very beautiful (and complex) choreography by William Forsythe, entitled “One Flat Thing, reproduced”
This incredible project (which is much richer than what I have show) illustrates three feature of what could be a collective modeling assuming a temporal instead of topological framing.
And here comes the second qualification, because I don’t think that it is fair to say social sciences have too often forgotten time. On the contrary, I would say, social sciences have been pretty good at narrating collective dynamics. What they have rather lack are specific effort to model social change. By modelling I refer to an explicit and formalized description (as opposed to a more qualitative report).