“…The first congress of the French Association of Sociology (AFS) in February 2004 included over 1,000 different presentations and 3,000 participants. We decided to map the abstracts of presentations as they were published in the conference program book and distributed to all participants 4 , and to compare and confront the results of several methods of textual analysis of this same corpus: Philip Cibois' Trideux factorial correspondence analysis (Cibois, 1983(Cibois, , 1990(Cibois, , 1995, the analysis of co-occurrence of key words by Calliope, Max Reinert's Alceste hierarchically descending classification analysis (Reinert, 1986(Reinert, , 1990, and Francis Chateauraynaud's Prospero program of text-based analysis of controversies (Chateauraynaud, 2003;Chateauraynaud et al, 2003). This cooperation resulted in the publication of the BMS, n. 85, January 2005, with the results of the analysis of the 2004 AFS abstracts by these four methods.…”