Agency distribution to social entities in Twitter computer sciences
Computer sciences often address problems that are familiar for social sciences. The article proposes to examine how these works, which are often highly formalized in mathematical and algorithmic terms, take up standard social views. On this occasion, it is proposed to reduce the choices of viewpoints made by the social sciences to three distributions of power of action (agency) to different entities : structure, individual preferences and replication (without ignoring their various combinations). An in-depth discussion of these approaches in the sociological tradition makes it possible to advocate the relevance of such a reduction in three points of view. Twitter is a very attractive prototype field for computer sciences that want to deal with social processes : despite its high-frequency nature, which spontaneously would favor the agency of conversations or messages, the three points of view (structure, individual preferences and replications) are used in this literature, which shows, all the more so, the power of the points of view that the social sciences have succeeded in disseminating to all audiences. The presentation of remarkable articles for each of these agency distributions allows us to display the fruitfulness of these works, too often ignored by the social sciences.