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Digital solutions
CDSP develops and integrates software solutions to facilitate social science research. These tools, most of them Open Source, underpin the life-cycle of data and metadata from collection through to dissemination.
This page summarises CDSP’s digital expertise, illustrated through projects dating back to 2006.
Design of web applications
In support of social science research, CDSP conducts different web application design projects.
In order to support the production and handling of quantitative data, CDSP has developed panel management applications from design through to implementation:
- at national level for ELIPSS (2012-2020),
- and more recently WPSS (2019-2023), the tool used to manage the European Social Survey’s (ESS ERIC) CRONOS-2 panel.
The beQuali site (2012-2019) also offers an example of innovative functions for the interactive exploration of digitised and contextualised survey datasets.
Integration of existing solutions
CDSP also has the capacity to support the adoption of existing and usually Open Source solutions, when there is no need for a dedicated development process. One significant example of this is Dataverse “data.sciencespo.fr”, established by CDSP as the institutional repository of Sciences Po’s research data (2020).
Technical environment
The technologies employed are mainly Python as the programming language and its web “framework” Django, along with the now completed transition to Docker servers orchestrated by Kubernetes. For their part, the project management activities are managed by the extended Git version control tool from the Gitlab suite.
