exploring the relationship between social science and software development methodologies: a blog by Pascal Belouin

I recently came across Bitcoin and, being more and more interested in Economics, found the idea very exciting. Bitcoin could be described as a cryptography-based peer-to-peer currency, created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. People have an electronic wallet, which can contain a number of public addresses (one of mine is 1NgRqMgGu4BFVwBn8yEMPZgLdK5PXpBeRa, if you feel generous). [...]

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§448 · May 26, 2011 · Theory · 4 comments · Tags: , , , ,


The central perspective that underlies most of the articles featured on this blog could be summarised by the notion of ‘software as discourse’. I would like to give an overview of what this concept means to me from a theoretical point of view, on which assumptions it relies, and what it entails from a methodological [...]

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Conversation Analysis could be defined as a discourse analysis method which relies on the assumption that only talk-in-interaction constitutes a valid object of analysis: relevant meaning is only created in the framework of an actual conversation between two or more participants. Thus, Conversation Analysis is often described as a positivist approach: conversation analysts argue that [...]

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I recently had the opportunity to write a first draft for a web application allowing office workers to order hot and cold drinks online. It’s far from perfect, but gives an idea of how this problem can be approached! Introduction The aim of this document is to provide a first draft design for an online [...]

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I take the liberty of going off-subject a little bit by publishing this essay I wrote recently. Hope some will find it of interest! Abstract Neuroscientific discourses about addiction have greatly contributed to our understanding of the biological phenomena that accompany repeated, compulsive drug use. We now have a deep understanding of the mode of [...]

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LinkedIn recently went public. Its success makes it, with Twitter and Facebook, one of the three most popular social networking platforms. A particular strand of Social Identity Theory, and particularly the work performed on this subject by thinkers such as Marcel Mauss and Max Weber seem to provide an interesting way to analyse the emergence [...]

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Reductionism could be viewed as an essential theoretical component of modern natural sciences such as biology or genetics. Although reductionist approaches work very well as long as “natural” phenomena are studied, things become more difficult when human beings are involved as the object of study. Let us try and see how this notion of reductionism [...]

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I have tried to show in previous posts how certain aspects of an interactive system such as how it works, what it does, or what it represents, could be seen as emerging in the framework of its actual use. Furthermore, I have tried to provide a theoretical grounding to such an approach by borrowing from [...]

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Since I had a bit of success with my article about adopting a poststructuralist perspective towards user experience (Indeed, 2 people commented! amazing: Thank you Kshitiz and mc), I thought it would be nice to go a bit deeper in the subject, by briefly evoking some of the main notions behind poststructuralist theory and by [...]

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Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns” of everyday life. Thus, the basis of all social life can be found in all the small interactions we conduct every [...]

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