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Sure! It's Sciences Po médialab, in Paris.
https://github.com/medialab (linking Github, as it's much more relevant than the actual site). The tenets of the lab have (more or less) to do with exploring Gabriel Tarde's theories of "Actor-Network" and monads (nothing to do with FP, mind you).
One of the fundamental idea behind this being that everyone now generates traces on the web, and anthropologist/social sciences researchers may use them as a new "terrain" of research. It was founded by anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, and a group of engineers (who knew each other from school, where they were dabbling with programming for networks/exploration of the web early on).
By network, I mean graphs (math). Projects usually involves triumvirates of designers (usually specializing in information, sometimes students/researchers themselves), engineers, and politics or social sciences academics. Often being two things at a time. We have regular hackathon-like sessions called "datascapes" where we explore (sometimes, dormant) data sets, either from the web, or digitized (i.e. scanned historical archives, etc...) to make sense of it, and come up with relevant research questions. (We also do boring stuff to pay the bills, so that we have enough freedom to work on project we like afterwards). |