ASLAN studies the complexity of language. The project DatAgora, financed by the Lyon IDEX with partners IMU and ERASME visualizes and analyzes complex, multimodal, multiactivity traces of human interaction. We are at the crossroads of language sciences, education, computer science, and cognitive science. Work of both ASLAN and DatAgora is transdisciplinary because we involve stakeholders outside of research as equal partners. Within ASLAN, we collaborate with teachers and students, with migrants and language users around the world, with patients and health professionals, with families and associations, with policy makers, both public and private sectors, and so with citizens, society and government.
Context
Political, economic or social decision-making increasingly needs to be based on data while mobilizing an inter and transdisciplinary approach. The volume of data remains a challenge but its multi-source nature is also important. Data sets are developed as a step in answering research questions (often in response to a societal need), but they are associated with other existing data sets and enriched with models that depend upon the framework chosen. This is a scientific, technical, organizational and human challenge.
DatAgora chooses local, reproducible solutions as opposed to large infrastructure. We mobilize multi-source, complex data in collective decision support processes (e.g. analysis, interpretation, problem solving), which require prior understanding and contextualization. The local meeting place around data that ASLAN created centers around a wall of screens called the DatAgora room at ICAR. We are currently experimenting with SAGE2 software, allowing multiple researchers to simultaneously manipulate data in order to achieve their analytical goals. Other local solutions include the Amigo room, and a room in the metropolis in the Erasme Urban Lab.
Objectives
The first objective is to give researchers the possibility to propose different ways to view and manipulate their data. The second is to observe these researchers with a view to facilitating their work through different types of mediation. An initial way to do this is to document the use of the DatAgora wall of screens at ICAR as carried out by different interdisciplinary groups from financed ASLAN projects. This documentation is intended both to help researchers become autonomous and allow for reproducing the wall of screens in other research labs, also interested in viewing complex data and intervening simultaneously upon it during analysis.