Multi-scale methods for reconstructing collective shapes of digital diasporas

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.