Dematerialization and Environment: a text-mining landscape on academic, blog and press publications

This paper presents the methodology and results of an exhaustive text-mining analysis performed on the subject “Dematerialization and Environment”. Three main fields have been investigated: international academic publications (documents extracted from the Web of Science database during the period 1994-2013), French blog publications (pages crawled on the web for the years 2011-2012-2013) and French newspaper publications (articles published between 1993 and 2013). Lexical extraction, word specific selection by experts and cowording analysis were performed to produce thematic maps for each domain. Moreover, interviews were carried out with experts, researchers and practitioners to interpret the maps. The results presented in this article mainly show a semantic landscape focused on “telework, telecommuting and coworking” related activities. Semantic and historical evolutions highlight new working spaces such as “third places” impacted by digital uses and social practices. They reveal the main environmental issues practitioners have to tackle in a prospective way given the complexity of this emerging field.