About CERES

CERES is the Centre for Experimentation in Digital Methods for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Centre is part of the Faculté des Lettres at Sorbonne Université since 2021 and provides support to researchers and students whose projects rely on the use of digital methods in the social sciences and humanities.

This support focuses on 3 main areas :

digital methods and tools for the study of social platforms, the Internet and digital environments
methods and tools for the digitisation of historical sources and the study of digitised heritage
a transversal infrastructure dedicated to the management of multisemiotic data and analytical work

CERES provides technical and methodological support by promoting the use of existing tools (pages in FR) and by creating new methods and their dedicated tools (page in FR). The Centre has developed a strong epistemological framework on digital methods, in particular by theorising the relationship between the interpretive work of researchers and the use of new interfaces and digital tools. More broadly, the Centre works towards the development of interdisciplinary practices in science, starting with its own interdisciplinary team (page in FR) ;-).

What you can find on this website

Events : CERES organizes or co-organizes scientific events focusing on research that places digital methods at the heart of its approach. This page lists the symposia, study days and seminars organized.
Workshops : CERES organizes ~10 workshops a year, dedicated to helping researchers master computer tools and methods for research in the humanities and social sciences. Topics covered range from the automatic processing of natural language (for the study of press articles, for example), to the collection of material from digital social networks, to the visualization of multiple data (large numbers of images, structured text data, etc.). In this section, you’ll find all the information and presentation materials for past and future workshops (dates are indicated under the workshop titles).
Tutorials : As part of its mission to provide support in mastering IT tools for research, CERES publishes a range of tutorials to help you understand how these tools work, and how to work with digital data independently. These tutorials are generally transcripts of workshops or courses given by CERES members at Sorbonne University.
Tools : CERES deploys a variety of IT tools for research in the humanities and social sciences. In this section, we explain how these tools work, and address the key questions: what types of material/corpus/data can they be used with? What type of analysis can be obtained? How do you install them? These free software tools can also be found on the Github repository. Don’t hesitate to add your contributions and comments!
Podcasts : CERES produces a series of scientific podcasts, in which researchers are invited to talk about the role of digital methods in their research. The podcasts are listed below in chronological order.
Publications : CERES offers technical and methodological support tailored to the needs of researchers in the humanities and social sciences, taking into account the diversity of their skills and approaches. It is involved in a wide range of research projects, from study design and data collection to corpus cleaning, analysis and final visualization. This can take the form of collecting corpora of online press articles and tweets, or providing assistance in navigating large multimedia corpora, or even in the textometric analysis of documents or interviews. To carry out this mission, CERES conducts fundamental research to jointly develop methods and IT tools, to which is logically added a training and knowledge dissemination activity aimed at the academic world.
PhD Students/Candidates : CERES provides support for the two winners of the annual doctoral program “Digital methods for theses in the Humanities and Social Sciences” (advice on suitable methodological resources, on-demand training workshops, etc.).
Projects : As part of its research and methods development activities, CERES is a direct partner in funded research projects. These collaborations are distinct from the technical and methodological support service, in that they provide an opportunity to develop new tools and methods required to carry out the surveys/studies conducted by the partner projects. Once tested and proven, these tools and methods will be added to the current catalog of project support services. The articles in this section describe these projects.

All articles are written in French.