Toutes choses égales par ailleurs - Comparer deux congrès de L'Association Française de Sociologie

Abstract

All Things Otherwise Equal, Comparing Two Congresses of the French Sociological Association: This article analyzes the corpus of the 1,190 summaries of the French Sociologicial Association congress (Bordeaux, 2006) from a comparative point of view. It is focused on the multiple means and significances of a comparative study by mobilizing three approaches. The first aims at questioning the permanence of the summaries' authors and of the congress thematic organization. The second mobilizes certain Prospéro software algorithms to identify the more remarkable lexical and semantic variations. Finally, we continue the study certain objects whose heuristic value has been shown in our preceding analyses. Questioning comparative work, we show, at the same time, how the software provides a cognitive economy and empowers the interpretative inquiry of social scientists.