Science bloggers on Hypotheses.org : Communities and co-authorship

Résumé En

The diversity of science blogs that emerged in the 2000s, their success and longevity, hasgenerated a great deal of research. Blogging platforms have been studied more from theperspective of communication between layperson and expert than from the perspective ofinterdisciplinary collaboration and community building. The belief that blogs are personalobjects hide the fact that a lot of them are in fact written by more than one hand.We will present here part of the work done on the platform “hypotheses.org”. Created in 2008,in France, today it hosts several thousand academic blogs in Europe covering all areas of thehumanities and social sciences. Our corpus includes 389,089 posts written since the opening ofthe platform by 12,893 different authors on 3540 blogs.We studied the evolution of authors' co-presence in blogs and mapped clusters in order tounderstand the practice of collaboration or cooperation over three different four-year periods.Indeed, these practices vary. In some periods authors participate in several blogs gatheredaround a field of study or an academic discipline. But multi-author blogs can also exist aroundquestions of researcher practice (what methodology to adopt for the survey, or in their thesis)because the authors share a belief in the potential of new digital tools for research. In somecases they also gather around the hope that blogs and digital tools will allow a transformationof research institutions (evaluation in particular) and of the positioning of each researcher inrelation to their work. Hence the importance of academic blogs on reflexivity, methodology orepistemology in the early days. The study of these networks allows us to see how, in order toreach a wider public, researchers make themselves and their 'values' visible to their peers, andcan thus come together and cross disciplinary boundaries.