Multi-scale methods for reconstructing collective shapes of digital diasporas

Quentin Lobbé

doi:10.1057/s41599-021-00828-4

Abstract

The ICT revolution has impacted the way diasporic groups and individuals communicate and interact with one another. Diasporas are now fueled by unlimited flows of digital contents generated by daily activities or sudden historical events. As a natural result, the science of migration has evolved just as much as its own subject of research. Thus, dedicated branches of research like digital diasporas emerge at the crossroad between fields of social and computational sciences. Thereupon, new types of multi-scale reconstruction methods are developed to investigate the collective shapes of digital diasporas. They allow the researchers to focus on individual interactions before visualizing their global structures and dynamics. In this paper, we present three different multi-scale reconstruction methods applied to reveal the scientific landscape of digital diasporas and to explore the history of an extinct online collective of Moroccan migrants.

Highlights

We will use a semantic map for section “The scientific landscape of digital diasporas”, a phylomemy for section “The emergence of a socio-technical branch”, and explain how Web fragments were used to produce the results of section “Reconstruction of an extinct online migrant collective”
As previous studies suggested the possibility of a mutation of migrant blogs into new forms of social media (Khouzaimi, 2015), we focus our investigations on Web fragments that could include traces of social network
The multi-scale reconstruction methods used in section “The scientific landscape of digital diasporas” and section “The emergence of a socio-technical branch” are generic by nature

Summary

Introduction

A specific multi-scale reconstruction method will be applied to each section of this article, as these methods (see section “Multiscale reconstruction methods”) are well suited to reveal dynamical and structural aspects of any collective organizations: from communities of researchers to online networks of migrant Web sites. We will use a semantic map for section “The scientific landscape of digital diasporas”, a phylomemy for section “The emergence of a socio-technical branch”, and explain how Web fragments were used to produce the results of section “Reconstruction of an extinct online migrant collective”.

Results

Conclusion