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Wikimaps: Exploring collective attentions

Humanities and Social Sciences are not immune to the intense dynamics of digitization of data, their analysis and the means of their transmission. The tracking of social practices is also an opportunity to better understand the powerful social, economic and political change that has taken place in recent years. In order to contribute to the enhancement and clarification of this issue for humanities and social sciences, we propose to focus on one of its most emblematic demonstrations, in addition to being one of the most visited Internet sites: Wikipedia.

This exploratory project aims to extend the initiatives that have contributed to making Wikipedia more accessible and intelligible, by simplifying the exploitation of its potential. In particular, this project focuses on valuing the traces of the consultation of the pages, as so many elementary acts that involve collective attention and inform us of what matters. More specifically, by considering languages, time and space, it is thus possible to better characterize regimes of attention and the relative globality of social facts (attacks, elections, conspiracy theories, controversies, sports or cultural events…).

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