I am a social scientist and Java developer with a passion for discovering insights in big texts, networks and in unstructured data in general.
Work in social science
- 2003-2008: for my PhD under the guidance of Philippe Fontaine, I digged in archives (boxes of documents! plenty of boxes!) to write a contextualized history of economics and biology in post-WWII USA.
- 2009-2013: under the guidance of Paul Wouters and Ale Smidts, I used scientometric data and survey data to map the field of neuroeconomics and related disciplines. I relied a lot on Gephi, a software for the visualization of networks. Also the start of multiple attempts to share these software applications to the wiser public: with Gephi plugins, dekstop applets, and a couple of short-lived websites.
- 2014-2024: as an assistant then associate professor at em lyon business school and following the same research lines: methods in network visualization and natural language processing to generate insights from texts. Started Nocodefunctions in 2021 to make the software implementations of these methods accessible publicly, for free and without coding skills.
- 2024-present: left my position as an academic researcher to become an academic admin at GOBELINS Paris. My research interests are now expressed in the continued maintenance and development of Nocodefunctions.
Programming
Working with bigger texts and networks, I switched from using Excel to Java in 2011. The tools I created are scattered in academic publications, private and public Github repos, and websites which emerged and died. Examples of contributions:
- Umigon, best of class sentiment analysis for social media.
- A method to map Twitter fields, at scale.
- Gephi plugins and Gephi tutorials.
In the process, I developed skills in Java: Java itself, JakartaEE, Jakarta Faces + Primefaces, Javalin.
Today
I am now trying to increase the public impact of my academic work. In 2021 I started developping Nocodefunctions. It is a platform offering the tools I developed over the years, for non technical users and for free. It will also be the host and training ground for the new functions I am developing.