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Bunka is being developed and a Beta Version will be ready by December 2023
Bunka makes it simple to collect large corpuses from multiple sources online, and transform them into intuitive maps. It allows users to easily harness the latest natural language processing methods to extract meaning from unstructured data
Supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Culture Pass was born out of the desire to offer young people a scheme to promote access to culture in order to strengthen and diversify the cultural practices of individuals aged 15 to 20.
The scheme allows young people between the ages of 18 and 20 to benefit from €300 that they can spend on a variety of physical or digital cultural offers: films, novels, mangas, concerts, video games, musical instruments, etc.
At the beginning of 2022, the application has exceeded one million users, more than 11,000 partners are referenced (local authorities, cultural actors) with more than 6 million reservations.
Pass Culture used Bunka's technology to evaluate the impact of its system and to measure the diversification of cultural practices in a rigorous and precise manner. Bunka's technology makes it possible to measure the distance of use between two cultural products (how much they are consumed by different users).
This process demonstrated that, indeed, when using Pass Culture, young people are moving away from their "comfort zone" and exploring new products, very different from what they are used to consuming. As Mandy Lamas, Head of Studies & Research at Culture pass writes, "When we look at the evolution of the diversification score according to the length of time users have been using the Culture Pass, we see that young people diversify their cultural practices throughout their use of the device."
Full report here (in French).
More here.
In June 2022, Bunka partnered with Shaping AI to analyze what people have said, thought, and debated about Artificial Intelligence over the past decade.
Shaping AI is a multi-national and multi-disciplinary social research project that examines the global trajectories of public discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) in four countries (Germany, UK, Canada and France) over a ten-year period 2012-2021. It is a multinational collaboration by the Humboldt Institute of Internet and Society, Berlin, the medialab at Sciences Po, Paris, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methods at the University of Warwick, and the NENIC Lab at INRS Montreal, and the Algorithmic Media Observatory at Concordia University.
We collected 50,000 newspaper articles published in the last ten years that deal with AI. We then organized a workshop at the Medialab in Science Po with journalists and scientists to explore and understand everything that people have been saying about AI.
Using Bunka technology, we projected these 50 000 articles onto a two-dimensional space, based on their semantic proximity. This simple exercise makes one aware of the mass of what has been produced on the issue of AI. But above all, it allows us to realize that it is impossible to read all this information, even in a superficial way. The conversation around AI covers hundreds of different issues.
With Bunka, journalists and academics could thus grasp at a glance what are the main issues about AI, what people think of these issues, and they can then explore further in one direction, and zoom in on a particular sub-issues. Instead of “searching” about AI, they were “exploring” about AI.
More here.
