How to Orient Oneself in Thinking in the Digital Era: A mixed-methods ethnography of researchers' navigational practices on Gallica

The birth and development of digital libraries—broadly understood as curated collections of electronic documents accessible online on dedicated platforms with tools for search and consultation—have radically transformed research activities. Consequently, traditional practices observed in physical places of knowledge such as libraries and archives—searching catalogues, browsing through shelving, taking notes—have been supplemented with a series of digital practices developed by researchers to browse websites and databases— searching by keywords, filtering results, navigating through links. The ambition of this project is to reclaim a spatial understanding of digital libraries through the investigation of navigation as a fundamental information practice for researchers. Taking Gallica as a case study, this research situated at the crossroads of ethnography, data science, and digital humanities strives to shed light on how researchers “orient themselves” within a digital corpus. Bridging the gap between the ethnography of the digital—the qualitative study of scholars’ practices through observations and interviews—and digital ethnography—the quantitative analysis of navigation traces—, it developed mixed methods combining interviews with topological analysis of navigation paths extracted from server logs. This exploratory study led to promising findings on researcher’s navigation within the Dewey classification, on the role of “pivotal literature”, and on a first sketch of a variety of “regimes of navigation” clustered based on their topological features. More importantly, this research illustrates a perfect case of heuristic dovetailing between a quantitative approach enhanced by digital tools, and a more traditional qualitative approach. Along the course of this ongoing project, emphasis has been put on a reflexive critique of the nature of the data processed, the implications of every step of the pipeline, as well as their link with actual practices observed and objectified by researchers themselves.