Researchers and policymakers can compare how other researchers from all around the world view concepts related to social science and law after University professors and graduate students launched a new platform, according to a Feb. 5 news release.
The Sartori.network platform is part of a series of tools developed by the Concept Integration in Comparative Law project, which hopes to develop tools to improve constitutional design. Andrés Cruz, a government graduate student who led the project’s design, said the platform can help researchers see how other researchers define concepts so that they can work together.
“(Concepts) help us talk to each other,” said Cruz. “If two researchers are working on populism, for instance, they have to agree on what populism is in order to make progress.”
On the map, each concept is a dot viewers can click to see the definition of and its related ideas. All the concepts are color-coded and grouped into certain ontologies, or collections. Researchers can also add their own concepts to the map to see how it connects to other uploaded concepts.
The website is inspired by the work of Giovanni Sartori, an Italian political scientist who “urged political scientists to take their vocabulary more seriously in order to build on one another’s ideas,” according to the news release.
“(Sartori) was like ‘map this out, map what’s out there,’” Cruz said. “Maybe we took it too literally, because we were like ‘what if we could literally map this out?’’’
Cruz said he was most proud of the network’s multilingual model because it allows a researcher to submit concepts in different languages. Cruz said he wanted to make sure the network was accessible and easy to use.
“This project is all about ‘How can we get people to use these tools?’” Cruz said. “It’s all about ‘Are people going to want to use this?’”
Ashley Moran, co-director of the Center for Law and Democracy, said she hopes to see researchers add other concepts to the repository. The center supports research to advance “the rule of law and democracy” according to their website.
“We hope that this will become an ever-expanding resource,” Moran said. “A way for people to institutionalize their concepts, compare them with others, and have that information out there for others to use.”
Above all, Moran said she wants people to be aware these digital tools are available to anyone to use and interact with. “That’s our hope, that we have developed these tools in a way and packaged them in a very user-friendly way,” Moran said. “(So) people who are very new to using such digital tools can apply them right away in their research … regardless of their prior experience in the area.”