Announcement: CARME 2023 in Bonn, Germany

The ninth CARME conference will take place from 26-29 September 2023, in Bonn, Germany. More information is available at https://www.politik-soziologie.uni-bonn.de/de/carme23.

CARME 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa

The eighth CARME conference took place from 4-6 February 2019, in Cape Town, South Africa. More information is given at the conference website: https://carmesa2019.wixsite.com/conference

SVD workshop on Procida island 2015, Italy

After the CARME2015 conference in Naples, a one-day workshop on the singular value decomposition (SVD) was held on Procida island in the bay of Naples, 24 September, 2015. Guest speakers were Trevor Hastie, Michael Greenacre, Angelos Markos, Alfonso Iodice d'Enza and Pieter Kroonenberg.
For more information see http://www.carme-n.org/svd_workshop/

CARME 2015 in Naples, Italy

The seventh CARME conference took place 20-23 September, 2015, in Naples, Italy. More information is given at the conference website: http://www.carme-n.org/carme2015/

CARME workshop in Assos 2011, Turkey

The first CARME workshop was organized in Assos, Turkey, from 1 - 4 October 2011.

You can find further information on the workshop website:
http://www.carme-n.org/assos

CARME 2011 in Rennes, France

The sixth CARME conference celebrating 50 years of Correspondence Analysis took place in Rennes, France, from 9 - 11 February 2011. (Download Flyer (PDF).)

You can find further information on the conference website:
http://carme2011.agrocampus-ouest.fr/

CARME session at CLADAG-GfKl in Florence, Italy

Following the successful experience of Dresden, with CARME self-organised sessions in IFSC2009 Conference, we hereby announce a call for papers for the meeting jointly organised by Classification and Data Analysis Group of the Italian Statistical Society - CLADAG and the German Classification Society - GfKl. The conference took place in Florence, Italy, from 8 - 10 September 2010.

The objective of this session is to spotlight the very latest research in correspondence analysis and related techniques, and discuss future developments. Themes of the sessions include all forms of correspondence analysis and related fields, including visualization of categorical data: Simple correspondence analysis, Multiple correspondence analysis, Joint correspondence analysis, Multiway correspondence analysis, Canonical correspondence analysis, Nonsymmetrical correspondence analysis, Dual scaling, Optimal scaling, Homogeneity analysis, Multidimensional scaling of categorical data, Biplots of categorical data, Visualization of compositional data, Correspondence analysis in the social sciences, Correspondence analysis in ecology and the environmental sciences, Correspondence analysis in the health sciences, Correspondence analysis in marketing research and management, Principal component analysis, Geometric data analysis.

Further information: (Flyer (PDF))

Some Notes on the History of CARME

In 1991, on the initiative of Prof. Walter Kristof (formerly of the Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg), the first international conference ever held on the topic of correspondence analysis was held in Cologne, Germany, hosted by the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (Central Archive for Empirical Social Research) of the University of Cologne. This conference, called "Correspondence Analysis in the Social Sciences", drew an audience of about 50 people from seven countries.

Four years later in 1995, we decided to repeat the conference, but on a wider theme: "Visualization of Categorical Data". The audience grew, now we had already 90 participants, and so did our enthusiasm. From these two conferences two edited books appeared, with the same names, and have come to be recognized as major reference works in this area of research.

Again, four years later in 1999, we held another conference, this time distributing CD-ROMS of data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) to all participants, with the requirement that all participants had to analyse data from this database, using any method of their choice. This conference, "Large Scale Data Analysis", affectionately dubbed "LSD Analysis - a hallucinating experience" drew a yet wider audience of statisticians and sociologists, with parallel sessions entitled Religion and Social Inequality, for example, not a common event at a conference fundamentally dedicated to statistical methodology! The number of participants increased again, now to 120, with participants from 20 countries from all continents.

Four years later in 2003, we had our fourth in the series of "Cologne conferences", this time at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. We decided to return to our original topic of correspondence analysis, but keeping the door open to "related methods" to foster the continuing debate on visualization of complex multivariate data, hence the conference was called "Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods", or simply CARME. This time we received 180 participants, again from all continents, who presented 82 papers and 6 posters. Again, we decided to edit a book, this time we changed the title slightly to focus on "Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods". Having finalized this manuscript, 15 years after our first conference and a huge amount of travelling between Barcelona and Cologne/Bonn, we thought that there is need for a homepage that is dedicated to "CARME" and its network "CARME-N".

By the way, "Carme" is a Catalan girl's name, the Catalan equivalent of the Spanish "Carmen".

The fifth conference took place in Rotterdam, and the name CARME seemed to have taken root, so now the conferences were becoming "CARME conferences" and even "CARME sessions" started to pop up in other conferences (e.g., the IFCS meeting in Dresden in 2009 and the CLADAG/GfKl conference in Florence in 2010). Rather than a book it was decided to publish selected papers in a special issue on "Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods" in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. The special issue appeared in June 2009 and the reference for the editorial is Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, volume 38, pages 3103-3106.

The sixth CARME conference took place in February 2011, organized by Jérôme Pagès and his team from the Agrocampus in Rennes, France. The venue was fitting because Rennes was the place where correspondence analysis originated 50 years before. As well as celebrating 50 years of correspondence analysis, it was also the occasion to celebrate 40 years of the biplot (published in Biometrika by Ruben Gabriel, 1971) and canonical correspondence analysis (published in Ecology by Cajo ter Braak). As a result of this conference an edited book has been published: Visualization and Verbalization of Data (Blasius & Greenacre, eds, Chapman and Hall, 2014, http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466589803). The book is dedicated to the memory of Paul Lewi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lewi), a great fan and supporter of CARME, who passed away in 2012. Half of this book is devoted to historical aspects of multidimensional graphical methods, by the following authors: Michael Friendly, John Gower, Jan de Leeuw, Ludovic Lebart, Gilbert Saporta, Cajo ter Braak, Patrick Groenen, Ingwer Borg and Fionn Murtagh.

Michael Greenacre and Jörg Blasius

July 2014