Abstract
This issue of the BMS includes four research articles – three in English and one in French – and two research notes – one in each language. Usually, the BMS publishes first all research articles, followed by the research notes. However, with the recent death of our friend and colleague, Alain Desrosières, internationally know for his work on the history and development of statistics, particularly in the social sciences, he is the subject of our first text which is a research note titled simply “Alain Desrosières”, by BMS editor Karl M. van Meter. The second text is a research article in English, “The History of Statistics as a Genre: Styles of Writing and Social Uses”, by Alain Desrosières, which is a brief historical summary of five selected steps in the social uses of history and the different ways in which the history of statistics has been written and used.
The second research article in English is “An Order on Cross-Tabulations and Degrees of Association” by Philippe Cibois, who addresses the question of whether or not an order structure on the rows and columns of a cross-tabulation means that the resulting table has a particular structure that can be identified. The result is a unification of all types of cross-tabulations, ordered or not, in a single type of table where cross-tabulations differ only by the intensity, whether significant or not, of the order found.
The third research article, in French, “Filling Out Questionnaires – Chronicle of a Public Space Solicitor”, is by François-Joseph Daniel who profiles the solicitation work of surveyors through the ethnographic description of a questionnaire interviewer’s work to determine the efficiency with which the questionnaire is administered and how the interaction framework unites the respondents and interviewers.
The fourth research article, in English, “Forms and Modes of Apprehending Interdisciplinarity – A Socio-Computer Analysis of Sports Sciences”, by Cécile Collinet, Philippe Terral, Patrick Trabal and Matthieu Delalandre, demonstrates the methods and tools for analyzing a corpus of scientific texts and shows that interdisciplinarity explicitly appears in scientific papers, not only as a discussion topic, but also as an organizational watchword, specifically in sports sciences.
The second research note, in English, is “XI Conference of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) – ‘Discovering New Frontiers in Quality of Life Research’ (1-4 November 2012, Venice, Italy)”, by Filomena Maggino, who traces the development of methods and movements involved in measuring quality of life, including the new QUARS measurement system and the work of the OECD.