 Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Robyn de Moura. Thank you already. I'm glad to be here. So today I will be the spokesperson for myself but also Audrey Banex with whom we prepared this talk together but who couldn't join, unfortunately. So I will talk about interdisciplinarity, multi-tasking and what working in the interdisciplinary research environments does to decision-making processes and also to open research tools development. So the context I'm speaking from is a lab called the Media Lab of Sciences Po which is an interdisciplinary laboratory and which explores the relationships between digital technologies and society. So this lab is made by individuals who come from very different backgrounds the interdisciplinarity. But this interdisciplinarity has two scales, so to speak, because also each individual is himself or herself the spokesperson for a variety of cultures of intellectual interests and also of lines of expertise. So here is what these people look like. Here is where Audrey stands and here is where I stand. So all of these people do things together and because or thanks to this diversity they have variegated activities. So they do social sciences inquiries of course but they also teach and produce tools whether they be code libraries or other shelf applications. And often one person is involved in more than one of these activities. So they do these activities in a variety of contexts. Some of them are clearly and precisely defined like collectively funded research projects. Others like PhD research for instance are more open-ended and have less defined boundaries and aims. So we build tools, papers and experiments for a variety of publics. So first our colleagues and fellow researchers but also students and several professional groups like library specialists. All the activities we do are linked and feed each other and this talk will be a description of how at Media Lab we cope with this intertwining. It will focus on describing what are the consequences and modalities of doing things in the same place and often with the same persons. Underlying this description I will make is a methodological reflection for which I hope to foster some discussion which is the fact that we all know methodologies coming from the industry and or software production culture like agile methods, UX research, UX design the difference between proof of concept and the production ready products but my question is how do these established methods and labels dialogue with our specific research context. So to do so the description will focus on two nodes of methodological tension and two sets of practices. The first one will be the question of writing in social sciences and it will address the relationship between prototypes and products research and development or what it means to be at the same time the users and the makers of the software positions we make. The second will be the question of social inquiry on the web and it will address decision making processes and the question of how we cope with the separation of concerns and responsibilities between individuals within this interdisciplinary context. So first we'll look at how tools making and experiments are intertwined and how the mix of context described before allows to trace a complex interweaving between inquiry practices, experimentation and open research tools stabilization so to speak. So to situate this concern I will address the question of writing and publishing in social sciences which is my privileged area of research and interests. So the past decade has been marked by a lot of brilliant initiatives, technologies and tools that try to establish new standards to leverage digital technologies in the service of better editorial processes of polymorphic publishing but also sometimes to question what it means to write digitally as a social science researcher. So in that regard Medialab has been structured since its inception 10 years ago by the pedagogical activity of what we call controversy mapping. So controversy mapping is a specific kind of sociological inquiry which consists in describing the different point of view and at stake in a social technical dispute or controversy like for instance ungrowth as you will see in the example I will show. And in these courses students are asked to produce as outcome of their websites of their research sorry not reports not papers but websites. So why do we ask them that? It's because by using hypertext they are allowed to express the multiplicity of point of view which controversy description requires. So first reason hypertext and the second reason is that it allows students to write closer to the inquiry documents that they use for instance images, interviews, official documents by staging them directly inside the websites. So in parallel to this activity, these pedagogical activities Medialab was also structured by the practice of data scapes which are research endeavors that consists in building at the same time data sets, research questions and a web publication which combines hypertextual navigation and data visualization. So these two prior experiences gave practical and intellectual basis to another project in the lab called AIM. AIM stands for an inquiry into modes of existence. So it's a project grounded in 30 years of field study by a single researcher which is called Bruno Latour and this project consisted among other activities in creating a platform allowing to read both the text written by Bruno Latour but also to browse the documents, so videos, images, references he gathered during his career and used to produce his arguments. The platform also allowed readers to participate by proposing contributions in the same document-based writing mindset. So on this project I was a PhD student at the time in a situation of participant observation and with the designer of the project who is called Donato Ricci we quickly started to think about ways to reuse and translate this platform, this structure or to fork its way of writing close to the materials to other research projects. For that we wrote a grant request that asks funding to build an open source technology to do that but it was rejected, twice. But it was not a big deal because at the same time I published the first results of my inquiry on the AIM project in a co-written paper with members of the team Donato Ricci but also Christophe Lecair and Bruno Latour and it was not just an account of my results but also an experimental format on itself based on what some called scroll detailing which means that things appear while you are scrolling and reading the article and it was, so to speak, a way to test some ideas that we were before asking money for but didn't have. So this first experiment was also the occasion of first technical experiments, a custom document generation system using Mardin and Biptext languages to allow us, so as a team of co-writers to directly write the article but also its visualizations specification and to iterate and collectively interact in this kind of writing. So in parallel in the lab at the same time controversy mapping courses were scaled up because of their success and this asked to develop an open source solution that would allow to build social sciences websites in an easier way while not being captive of commercial platforms and also while mitigating technological obsolescence problems that we saw arising with the students' productions. So out of this the team made a solution which is called driving and which consists in allowing to turn a Google Drive folder into a static website. So on my side after having left Medialab to continue my PhD I developed on my side some processes, I developed some of the processes I observed and tested around the M-project and it came out as something called Peritext which is a series of hypothesis about what document structures and modes of presentation would address better interweaving between empirical materials writing and scholarly publication and to make a meaningful use of polymorphic, polyformat contemporary context of scholarly publishing. I mean by that publishing on the web but also in various editorial contexts. So to do that I wonder what would be a thinking of writing at the contextualization of some resources and I wondered what would happen if researchers had the opportunity to specify more finely those contextualizations and how they should look like depending on their position in the text but also depending on the output formats. A second hypothesis was to think about these resources as all possible points of departure for writing activities instead of just considering texts so chapters and sections as the backbone of what scholarly publishing could be. So this would allow to generate a variety of editions for a given production and to very points of view and the roles for the documents being produced depending on the research stage or its aim. So once I formulated this hypothesis I wanted to test them but that would have required the insight project of creating yet another ecosystem of JavaScript libraries so I did it and started to experiment with this at first but after my, so yeah, these are an example of the modules that are inside this ecosystem. So after my PhD funding ended I came back to Medialab to cope with the change of controversy mapping scaling up and this was eventually the occasion to actually test this hypothesis on a real use case. So out of this came FONIO, which is this time collective effort and which is a collaborative editor, so open source, everything is open source in what you see here, a collaborative editor allowing to write digital dissertations and download them as static websites. So it's built for social sciences in the sense that it allows to write footnotes to use bibliographic references and the diversity of resources and it allows to write hypothetically through interactive lexicon and internal links. It also allows students to design their websites within the interface. So while doing that my PhD continued at the same time I developed a new editor called Ovid which is a single user, more experimental and advanced tests of the peri-text hypothesis. So Ovid is a turn towards practices which are not necessarily relevant for students, for instance data visualization, but also advanced grocery production like entity definitions, places, a person, etc. And it also allows to go further in the design of the outputs and to create multiple editions both for screens and printers. So these two projects of course were developed together and have a lot in common, but their code base remains separated mostly because they address different contexts and goals. So FONIO has been used by students by more than 2,000 students so far and now they are conducting and doing their own experiments on top of that framework. And concerning Ovid, a document which happens to be a hypothesis should be out someday soon. Here is a prediction from the students. So now I will zoom at a closer level and rather than talking about temporal dynamics I will focus on relations between people at stake in tools development. How does the decision about our tools evolution is made and implemented? And for that I will take the example of a software called HiveRazor. But before speaking about it, I must speak about Hive. So for which HiveRazor is a kind of interface if you want. So Hive is a tool made for a very specific research practice which embeds in its working strong methodological assumptions. It's a tool allowing researchers to build corpuses of web pages about a specific topic. So for instance I don't know coronavirus or palm oil. So the idea is that these web pages are selected and regrouped by researchers as web entities which represents the different actors of the issues. So organizations, persons. And then analyze the relationship between actors through the relationships between web pages corresponding to them. So it is quite quantitative in the sense that it allows researchers to really choose which websites they want to add to their corpus. But also by analyzing the contents of these web pages to generate automatic processes to fetch new website suggestions and then work iteratively between the machine and the researcher. So now HiveRazor in this qualitative frame is a student oriented interface to Hive. And it allows to browse the web while constituting the website's corpus. And students have a way to both read the websites and see how their corpus evolves through visualization. Sorry for my voice. So after two years of use we decided that we should continue the development of the project and make it evolve in harmony with what it was used for. So to do that we started with a series of conversations with all the persons in contact with the app. So students, teachers, but also engineers, researchers and so on. So we discussed with them in which context they use HiveRazor but I also asked them to perform some activities while being interviewed and encouraged to explain what they were doing, understanding and feeling. So from that a series of remarks were defined then turned into cards and collectively discussed with all of the actors participating to that redesign. Out of these discussions some wireframes were made and from these wireframes these propositions came out new discussions and new iterations. So these meetings were interesting because they revealed the diversity of interests and priorities within the lab. They allowed to carry a peaceful negotiation process but also to reveal the diverging attachments and concerns at hand in this process. So who are on this battlefield? Which is the redesign meeting. We have the original designers or the spokesperson who designed a clue methodology and its embodiment in the tool and don't want the tool to evolve in order to risk of confusing the initial methodological message so to speak that the tool is supposed to carry. We have also the developers who are worried about refactoring avalanches that would be triggered by new propositions and evolutions of the tool. We have also of course the teachers who are using this in the classroom and they want to voice out non-conventional uses of the tool such as for high-brother teaching through the tool how such engines work or using it as a tool for building scholarly cytographies formatted in the complying bibliographical norms. We have also researchers who use the tool even if it's made for students initially and they want to be able to discuss and twitch methodological embeddings in the tool. We have specialists who bring their also their strong archiving culture and background to the discussion. And last but not least we have what I call mediators. So people whose role is to promote, explain, document and who are actually articulating the tool with different practical contexts. So two remarks about this situation. The first is that these mediating roles are quite important to allow distributed negotiation concerning the evolution of the tool. But second is also that several persons that you see listed here are in multiple positions and this is the feature of an interdisciplinary laboratory. And this is very useful to mitigate misunderstanding and also to enhance dialogue between functions and responsibilities who are however not shared. So as a conclusion developing from the field means being situated in a diversity of negotiation processes between experiment and query and software stabilizations but also between multiple interests, voices and responsibilities. That way of doing allows us to improve the relevance of the tool we make but also to foster important conversations, scientific conversations concerning the methodological assumptions that we embed in the tool we make. It also allows to create an environment, an open environment of tools which correspond to each other. And to finish I will just add that one of, so I present two of the parts of this environment and one other which is called TESEL will be presented tomorrow by Arnaud Pichon at length and I will end on that. Thank you. So is this available in other languages than French? So both HiveBrother, Phonio but also Ovid are bilingual in French and English in their interface. Thank you.