Flow and sharing of information on social network sites and transformations of journalism – INFO-RSN

This project explores the new forms of consumption of information on the social networks sites (SNS) and the journalistic practices (including innovative formats) that are associated with it. The aim is to highlight the roads and the factors of appropriation and sharing of articles coming from news sites. We intend to tackle this problematic into two complementary approaches, both in their scientific and methodological dimension.

1) The first level concerns the collection and use of a public corpus of mass data extracted from SNS (mainly Twitter and Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest as exploratory and complementary) referring links to information produced by thirty news sites selected for the study. The exploitation of this corpus will lead to identifying the specificity of information circulated on SNS (thematic, format, temporality, etc.) and the social logics (eg influence) related.
One of the challenges of this first axis is to create tools for dynamic and interactive visualization to uncover ways and logics of flow to the heart of social networks and to identify their possible regularities, in the form of model. Thanks to cooperation between researchers in information science and communication and information technology, we will proceed to the extraction of knowledge through processes of interactive visualization, adapted to data, in order to highlight aspects previously undetectable and enable an innovative use of manipulated data. This "design" of data will help to better prioritize, make visible, and access to relevant information at the heart of our multidimensional data. In this sense, the INFO-RSN project will be part of the epistemological and methodological debate is now open for the digital humanities.

2) In parallel, we will conduct an analysis of the uses and practices of production, consumption and sharing information on the SNS. This project is a continuation of the work done over the past two years in our Observatory of webjournalism, on the insertion of journalistic production on the SNS. This understanding of those “being done uses”, which opens up opportunities for further analysis to the study of "traces", is based on qualitative methods that we apply to two areas:

* A panel of Internet users, which will be monitored throughout the duration of the project, and asked (in focus groups in particular) on their use and not – use – of SNS for information. The influence of the variable "community of interest" (existing before or made by the SNS) on circulated and sharing articles from news sites will be studied in detail.

* Media newsrooms national general information. The practices of journalists and the media are upset by these new modes of consumption of their products. Thus, we will interrogate the writing formats (like live-blogging) and the ways of presence and action on the SNS, by querying the pressure to innovate that has this new context.

INFO-RSN is, by its ambitions, a multidisciplinary project. It combines a science lab of information and communication (CREM), a computer lab (LCOMS), and a company specialized in modeling and optimization : and innovative start-up (Semiocast, an expert in the study of social conversations online and behavior of Internet users). Already three news sites (le Nouvel Observateur, FranceInfo, Metro) have expressed interest in being involved in the project to conduct timely and thorough studies through the sharing of confidential data from their platform.