Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou

The Law Factory is a research project which attempts to make it easier to observe the law-making process in the French Parliament. It allows to track down the different steps of the parliament process, to identify when a particular piece of law was introduced, and to look at all the amendments and the debates per article. The software is fully open-source, based on Python 3 for the data collection. It's a common project of the association Regards Citoyens, the médialab research lab of Sciences Po Paris and the Centre d’Études Européennes et de Politique Comparée.

In this Talk we will present the work done and the research output produced.

Other people: Damien Marié

This is a live panel session which gathers speakers from three lightning talks about web mining tools and technologies.

Other people: Guillaume Levrier Béatrice Mazoyer

The World Wide Web’s original design as a vast open documentary space built around the concept of hypertext made it a fantastic research field to study networks of actors of a specific field or controversy and analyse their connectivity. Navicrawler, IssueCrawler, Hyphe... Over the past 15 years, a variety of web crawling tools, most often free and open source, have been developped by or for social sciences research labs across the world. They provide means to engage with the web as a research field or to teach students what the WWW is beyond Google or Facebook’s interfaces.

We will first present an overview of this history of open source web crawling tools built for research, teaching or data journalism purposes. Then we will propose a short demonstration of the latest version of médialab's HyBro, aka Hyphe-Browser, a tool built to let users benefit from automated web crawling as well as in situ web browsing and categorizing. Its friendly user interface allows a variety of publics to engage with web crawling, including non-experts like students, social science scholars, and activists.