Methodological support – who can participate?

The Cartography Studio’s Monthly Labs are associated with médialab’s METAT collective, offering opportunities to share expertise, technique, and methods with the research community. If requests concern certain kinds of visualizations (such as cartography), METAT sends them to the Monthly Labs. If the request involves analyzing questionnaire results, coding, or text mining, the person concerned will be directed to other experts in the collective. The Sciences Po research community—School of Research students, doctoral students, and researchers—is the primary target for the labs. However, the registration form also leaves the door open to other research communities (in particular the Institut Curie). 

How does the Monthly Lab work? 

This personalized support takes place on the morning of the first Thursday of every month. Each member of the Cartography Studio addresses one request, according to his or her expertise. These requests should be expressed as precisely as possible beforehand on the questionnaire. Concretely, the person making the request is given a one-hour appointment (either in person or remotely). The issue addressed must be specific: a particular method, a response to a precise question. The Monthly Labs are not data visualization classes with regular attendance. The appointments are meant to be one-off, designed to offer a helping hand when encountering a technical impasse or a methodological bump in the road. 

What kind of requests were made this year?

The Monthly Labs address all disciplines, including, of course, geography (electoral geography of green parties in France), but also history (the existence of anti-nazi resistance in Lithuania), sociology (the subjective geography of cultural sites in Kaboul), as well as public policy (promoting SGAR of Occitanie’s transportation plan) or international relations (transformation in the International Organization for Migration). In total, the team offered support to twenty young colleagues this year. The wide variety of requests mirrors the diversity of the community. It is also a reflection of the growing role of digitalization in research projects: preparing specific background maps, pointing researchers in the right direction in their cartographic explorations of their research data, or helping them use their intuition to express their cartographic needs.