The BMS partners with the “Mixed Methods” team in Rennes

Abstract

What makes a journal interesting, if not the articles it publishes? Journals with a high international profile can count on a large number of submissions and select articles that conform to the scientific canons that, for ease of reference, are referred to as “mainstream”. For “niche” journals such as the BMS (Duchesne et al., 2023), they have a specific editorial project that makes them less visible, but also requires them to be in contact with authors likely to respond to this editorial project. The best way to do this is to form partnerships with institutions or colleagues who can put the journal in direct contact with these authors. Historically, the BMS entered into a contract with RC33, the logic and methodology network of the International Sociological Association (ISA), at a time when the tools and techniques for collecting and analysing data in the social sciences were still of interest only to a very limited number of colleagues. This partnership continues, as shown by the autumn edition of the RC33 Newsletter published at the end of this issue. More recently, when Karl van Meter entrusted the journal to us and we refocused the editorial project on the reflexive narration of research experiences, we approached Nonna Mayer and Samy Cohen, who run a seminar at Sciences Po with a similar ambition. Together we created a section named after this seminar – ‘Social sciences in question’ – in which so far half a dozen articles have been published (Baczko, Dorronsoro and Quesnay, 2021; Cohen and Mayer, 2019; Coppedge et al., 2019; Fourment, 2019; de Maillard, 2019; Offerlé, 2019). A new article in this section, by Benjamin Tainturier, Charles de Dampierre and Dominique Cardon, also appears in this issue. The authors discuss how they attempted to measure anti-Semitic discourse on YouTube, using an ‘imprinting’ approach based on machine learning methods and the training of an automatic language processing tool. With the digitalisation of the world, but also the development and professionalisation of the social sciences, survey methods continue to diversify, so that the divide that structured their development – the opposition between qualitative and quantitative approaches – may now seem outdated. For a time, the notion of mixed methods was even interpreted by some qualitative researchers as an attempt to standardise their survey methods, inspired by the quantitative approach. But those days seem to be over. Today, the links between methods, apparently drawing on different epistemologies, seem to open the way to innovative and varied experimentation. In order to get closer to a pool of authors focusing on these issues, we gladly accepted an invitation from the three founders of the ARENES laboratory’s ‘Mixed Methods in the Social Sciences’ summer school, Thomas Aguilera, Tom Chevalier and Benoit Giry, to come and present the