Research
COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE FOR POLICY
I have always been convinced of the importance of informing policymakers. Computational methods could help us reach general enough and sufficiently results in a timeframe adapted to actual political decision. I have for instance proposed an agenda for a "computational diplomacy" framework, or evaluated in real-time the impact of the "leaks" organized by the French government regarding future measures the opinion and behaviors of the French population during COVID-19.
Florian Cafiero, "Detecting negativity and dissensus in international talks. Experiments with accounts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sessions (2001-2022)", ICCS, 2024.
Florian Cafiero, "Datafying diplomacy: how to enable the computational analysis and support of international negitiations", Journal of Computational Science, 2023.
Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, Nicolas Walser, Gérald Bronner, Effect of Gender on French High School Students’ Dream Jobs and Professional Ambition. Socius, 9, 2023
Jeremy K. Ward, Florian Cafiero, Patrick Peretti-Watel, "Governing by press release ?", Infectious diseases now (formerly Médecine et maladies infectieuses), 2021
SOCIAL NETWORKS AND VACCINE CONTROVERSIES
In the past twenty years or so, doubts towards vaccines have become an increasingly important global public health issue - especially in France, where vaccine hesitancy is among the highest in the western countries. Through various types of data, ranging from the results of the French citizen consultation on vaccination to contents posted on websites or Twitter, I am studying the dynamics of criticism or defense of vaccines.
Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, "The link between interest in alternative medicines and vaccination coverage", Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, 2023.
Florian Cafiero, Paul Guille Escuret, Jeremy K. Ward, “I’m not an antivaxxer, but…”: Spurious and authentic diversity among vaccine critical activists. Social Networks, vol. 65, p. 63-70, 2021.
Floriana Gargiulo, Florian Cafiero, Paul Guille-Escuret, Valérie Séror, Jeremy K. Ward, "Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter", Scientific Reports, 2020
Jeremy K. Ward, Florian Cafiero, Raphael Fretigny, James Colgrove, Valérie Seror, “France’s citizen consultation on vaccination and the challenges of participatory democracy in health”, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 220, pp 73-80, 2019.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES: DEFINiTION, DETERMINANTS, VARIATIONS
Using wide-scale surveys or analyzing online behaviour, we examine the social and demographic determinants of conspiracy beliefs.
Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, "Public Sector Corruption is Fertile Ground for Conspiracy Beliefs: A Comparison Between 26 Western and Non-Western Countries"; Social Science Quarterly, 2024
"Psychosocial determinants and consequences of the adherence to a social movement in a representative sample of the population", Pascal Wagner-Egger, Jais Adam-Troian, Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, Gérald Bronner, International Review of Social Psychology, 2021
Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, Gérald Bronner, "Why are conspiracy theories more succesful in some countries than in others ? An exploratory study from 22 western and non-western countries", Social Science Information, 2021
Laurent Cordonier, Florian Cafiero, Gérald Bronner, "Trendy plots: A Google Trends-based inquiry on the social determinants of conspiracy theories", International Conference on Computational Social Science, Massachussets Institute of Technology, 2020
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES
WHO WROTE WHAT ? AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION FROM THE TROUBADOURS TO QANON
Since its first steps in the 1960s, the study of linguistic properties specific to a certain author, also known as stylometry, has made tremendous progress. Under certain conditions, it can help to settle debates about the purported author of a text. It for instance confirms historians' claim that Molière is actually the author of his plays, and did not use a ghostwriter such as Pierre Corneille, as a century-old theory suggested. It can also give clues about texts whose authors are unknown - as in the case of the Troubadour's vidas. Without being able to name the author of each text, these techniques helped us understanding which texts could have been written by the same person or during the same period.
Cafiero, F., & Camps, J. B. (2023). Who Could be Behind QAnon? Authorship Attribution with Supervised Machine-learning. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 38, n°4, 2023.
Florian Cafiero, Jean-Baptiste Camps, "Why Molière most likely did write his plays", Science Advances, vol.5, n°11, 2019
Camps, J. B., Salvati, B., Freijedo, G., Bian, D., Drouet, G., Gaglione, E., ... & Cafiero, F. (2024, June). "The Authorship of the Works of Chrétien de Troyes: a Stylometric Examination". In DH Benelux 2024.
Florian Cafiero, Jean-Baptiste Camps, "Psyché as a Rosetta Stone? Assessing Collaborative Authorship in the French 17th Century Theatre", Computational Humanities Research, Proceedings CEUR WS, 2021
Jean-Baptiste Camps, Simon Gabay, Paul Fièvre, Thibault Clérice, Florian Cafiero, "Corpus and Models for Lemmatisation and POS-tagging of Classical French Theatre", Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, 2021
Jean-Baptiste Camps, Florian Cafiero. “Setting bounds in a homogeneous corpus : a methodological study applied to medieval literature”, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l’Information, pp.55-84., Hermann, 2013.
ORIGINS OF OUR LANGUAGE, ORIGINS OF OUR TEXTS
The birth of the French language
For a long time, latin and "vulgar" languages have been considered as two very distinct worlds, evolving their own separate ways. In an ongoing research projet with Rémy Verdo, we investigate the transformation from late latin to early romance in France. Inspired by works in sociolinguistics by Michel Banniard, we show how vulgar language and latine actually co-evolved and form a continuum rather than two separate entities. We study the variation of language registers from text to text, but also inside each text. We try at systematizing our study through machine learning tools.
Florian Cafiero, Rémy Verdo, “Modéliser le continuum latino-roman : de la sociolinguistique à l’intelligence artificielle”, Acta Antiqua, 2020, DOI : 10.1556/068.2019.59.1–4.40
Reconstructing manuscripts
Most ancient texts or scores we read today have been copied numerous times before arriving to us. In the process, voluntary changes by the copyists, or mistakes they have made, have altered the work's original version. To understand these errors and changes' history and get a better idea of what the original texts or scores looked like, Jean-Baptiste Camps and I elaborated on works by William Poole to develop an algorithm dedicated to the task. We also wrote a package for the software R, stemmatology to help implement our method.
Jean-Baptiste Camps, Florian Cafiero, “Stemmatology : an R package for the computer-assisted analysis of textual traditions”, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Corpus-Based Research in the Humanities CRH-2 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, 2018.
Jean-Baptiste Camps, Florian Cafiero. “Genealogical variant locations and simplified stemma : a test case.”, Lectio : studies in the transmission of texts & ideas, Louvain, Belgium. Brepols, pp.69-93, 2014.
WHEN WRITING IS FEELING : ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Using techniques derived from stylometry, I have experimented with colleagues met at Geneva University on our capacity to detect phenomena described by clinical psychology, only relying on the text written by subjects diagnosed with a particular condition. We first focused on Attention Deficit with or without Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), a complicated syndrom to diagnose, which draws more and more attention in the public sphere. Our first results give promising results, both for analyzing what ADHD does to linguistic expression, and to help diagnose ADHD.
Cafiero F., Gabay S.,, Barrios Rudloff J., Debbané M., Harnessing Linguistic Analysis for ADHD Diagnosis Support: A Stylometric Approach to Self-Defining Memories, in Rapid 5 @ LREC-COLING, 2024
Barrios Rudloff, J., Gabay, S., Cafiero, F., & Debbané, M., Detecting Psychological Disorders with Stylometry. In Computational Humanities Research, 2023.
Communications
Conferences (selection 2017 - * )
Digital Humanities (DH), George Mason University, 2024
International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), Universidad de Malaga, 2024
LREC-Coling, Torino, 2024
Digital Humanities Benelux (DH Benelux), Université catholique de Louvain, 2024
Climate Change Social Science Network, Brown University, 2024
Computational Humanities Research, Epita - Paris, 2023
Digital Humanities (DH), Graz Universität, 2023
Humanistica, Université de Genève, 2023
DH Benelux, Royal Library of Belgium, Bruxelles, 2023
Humanistica, Université de Montréal, 2022
DH Benelux, Université du Luxembourg, 2022
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) conference, 2021
Computational Humanities Research, Amsterdam, 2021
ACH, Rice University and University of Houston, 2021
AFS, Université de Lille, 2021
NETSCI, Sapienza - Università di Roma, 2020
IC2S2, Massachussets Institute of technology (MIT), 2020
DH, Carleton University et University of Ottawa, 2020
Sunbelt, International Network for Social Network Analysis, Paris, 2020
Humanistica, Université de Bordeaux, 2020
AFS (RT 21), Aix-Marseille Université, 2019
DIME-SHS, Sciences Po - Paris, 2018
LVLT, Eötvös Lorand University - Budapest, 2018
La Médecine en Délibération, Sciences Po Lyon, 2018
AIUCD, Università Aldo Moro - Bari, 2018
CRH, Austrian Academy of Sciences - Vienna, 2018
DH Benelux, Utrecht University, 2017
DH IHA, Institut Historique Allemand et INRIA, Paris, 2017.
Invited talks (selection 2018 - * )
Tokyo University (Todai), 2025
Ecole nationale des chartes - PSL, 2024
Ecole Militaire, Paris, 2024
Aalto University / Helsinki University, HELDIG seminar, 2024
Cambridge University - ENS AI seminar, 2024
Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales et du Développement, Genève, 2024
Université Paris-Dauphine, 2024
Ecole nationale des chartes, Journées annuelles Biblissima, 2023
New York University, 2023
Ecole nationale des chartes, "Voir par delà les flammes: philologie et intelligence artificielle au service des manuscrits brulés", 2023
Ecole Polytechnique, CREST, 2023
Université de Genève, 2023
Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l'Ecole Militaire, 2023
Enexdi, Université de Poitiers, 2023
Geneva Center for Security Policy, 2022
Université de Genève / Council of Europe / High commissioner for Human Rights - United Nations, Human Rights Week, 2022
Université Paris-Sorbonne, ObTic 2022
"What is an author?", University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA), 2022
From the modeling of social behavior to computational diplomacy, ETH Zürich / Université de Genève, 2022
Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris, Center for Data Sciences, DHAI, 2022
Enexdi, Université de Poitiers, 2022
EPITECH, Méthodes numériques pour les SHS, 2021
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, DataLAB, 2021
Rendez-vous de l'histoire, Blois, 2021
Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris - Littérature et humanités numériques, 2020
EHESS Marseille - Centre Norbert Elias, 2020
Université Paris-Sorbonne, OBVIL, 2019,
Université Paris-Sorbonne, GEMASS, 2019
Sciences Po Paris, Médialab, 2019
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 3ST, 2019
Harvard University, STS Circle, 2018
Columbia University, Mailman school of public health, 2018
Columbia University, INCITE, 2018
Professional service
Co-organizer of the international workshop "From bills to bytes: Computational Analyses of Parliamentary and International Organizations Data" (Paris Sciences et Lettres, 2024).
Co-organizer of the Computational Humanities Research (CHR) conference (EPITA -Paris, 2023). Member of the "best paper award" committee.
Co-organizer of the Worshop on AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) for the Analysis of Large Literary Corpora (Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris, 2023)
Scientific committee of the Digital Humanities / Artificial Intelligence (DHAI) Seminar, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (2023 - now)
Editorial team - "OpenMethods" - DARIAH (2019 - aujourd’hui)
Member of the seventh cluster of Biblissima + - Observatoire des cultures écrites anciennes , an award-winning project ("Equipex") dedicated to ancient written cultures, gathering 16 French institutions including the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), PSL, the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, the Ministry of Culture, the Natural History Museum of Paris etc.
Reviewer for Digital Humanities Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Public Health, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, Journal of Computational Science, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), JMIR Formative Research, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society:Series A, PLOS One, PLOS Computational Biology, Research & Politics, Scientific Reports, Social Science and Medicine, Vaccine
Member of the program committee of the conferences :
European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) (2023)
Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLIC-IT) (2023)
Digital Humanities (DH) (2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024)
Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) (2019, 2021)
European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) (2021).
Digital Humanities Benelux (DH Benelux) (2023, 2024)
Computational Humanities Research (2023, 2024)
Invitations
Visiting scholar - Aalto University (Helsinki) - Computer science department - invited by Pr. Eero Hyvönen, 2024
Visiting scholar - Columbia University (New York City) - INCITE - invited by Pr. Peter Bearman, 2022