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Norman Foster and his High-tech Architecture

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A building built in the concept of unbuilding. The building merges with the habitual activities of the people living in the society. A building to express the arts that exhibits the culture and heritage of the society which itself is an art. The art – Kala Academy, Goa. The artist – Charles Correa. However, the Kala Academy is a cultural center built by the Kala Academy Society and funded with the help of the Government of Goa. The Kala Academy Society is a non-profit organization that was established by the government of Goa that helps to promote local and international art forms.

Case Study of Kala Academy

• Architect: Charles Correa
• Funded by: Ministry of Art & Culture of the Government of Goa
• Started in: 1970
• Completed at:1983
• Location: Campal, Panaji
• Site Area: 6.3 Acres

History & Location

 The first chief minister of Goa had a dream of forming a society for arts in the state of Goa. Thus, the Kala Academy Society was formed by the Government of Goa. The society first decided to accommodate an existing built entity but later Rane who has known Charles Correa for a long time approached him. Thus, the art in the name of Kala Academy happened. The building is described as an apex body to develop music, dance, drama, fine art, folk art, literature, etc., and thereby promote the cultural unit of the state of Goa.

The site is located along the banks of the river Mandovi in the city of Campal, Panaji. This place is a mixed-use land with a military hospital, cricket ground, and a park around them. Being located in a beautiful riverfront view which habitats the fishermen to catch fish and relax themselves no wonder the site made Charles Correa excite. However, he designed it in such a way as to avoid any discomfort for the people living in that habitat.

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Planning of Kala Academy

The planning provides the space for exhibition halls auditorium, open-air theatre, lounges, cafeteria, meeting rooms, teaching rooms, black box, rehearsal rooms, and the admin block. The main building, service building, Muktangan, parking area, and exhibition space are divisions of the site. While the ground floor is being used for the public, the first floor carries the academic and administrative activities. With four entries the building had a well-defined pedestrian which never fails to surprise the people walking on the site.

The small gates in the entrances and the beautiful open space on one side with a lawn made the place even more public. The façade of the building which reminds us of the Villa of Savoye had a beautiful pergola that plays with the light and shadow, especially during the day. The entrances are open even at midnight so that the people can come here at any time to enjoy the environment.

Design of Spaces

More than just designing the spaces he just orchestrated it. That is how it should be told. The connection to the indoor spaces with the outdoor spaces just makes the people have a different experience. The poet Ranjit Hoskote once told about the building that “Let us not forget the laterite that forms its key medium – it articulates the flesh and blood of Goa’s architecture, it comes from the soi of Goa, from the soul of Goa.” There is no doubt that he told us the truth.

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Plaza & Art Gallery at Kala Academy

As the main theme of the building is to exhibit the arts belonging to the people of Goa, the main entrance directs us to the spacious plaza which itself is an art. The murals on the walls of the plaza which get mixed with the natural lighting confuse the people as if they were in a street of some other place. The confusingly interesting pattern continues even through the staircase leading to the first floor.

Art Gallery

The art gallery is the place to exhibit the art made by the people of Goa. The wall that carries those arts runs throughout the area for 30m with a height of 1.5m. All four sides are used to exhibit the arts. Spotlighting is used in the gallery with low intensity but pointing all over the wall.

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Dinanath Mangeshkar Kala Mandir (Auditorium) at Kala Academy

The auditorium was named after the great Goa-born singer Dinanath Mangeshkar. The murals of the plaza also continue to the auditorium creating an illusion of balconies where the people sit and enjoy the shows resembling old Goan theatres. Charles Correa approached Maria Miranda who is a great cartoonist to draw the murals of the auditorium which required acoustic extrusions in the drawings. The auditorium has a seating capacity of 1000 seats with a stage opening of 9.6m covering an overall area of 1300sq.m. The height of each raking rises to 10-20cm.

Open-Air Theatre

The open-air theatre happened to be on the east side of the site. Where the stage has a ceiling that is extended from the first floor of the building. With a seating capacity of 2000 (without chairs) the main open-air theatre forms the shape of a double herringbone. It connects to the east road on one side and the main lobby and the cafeteria on the other two sides. The lower seat rises by 30cm with a tread width of 100cm while the higher seat rises up to 45cm. When the seats block the noise from the road, the stage blocks the noise from the riverfront.

Mini Open-Air Theatre at Kala Academy

The mini open-air theatre stays on the north side of the building which can accommodate 300 people. However, with the farthest height of 6m, the open-air theatre is square in shape and covers an area of 56.25sq.m.

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Other Spaces

With other spaces like the black box, preview theatre, library, cafeteria, teaching studio, and the administration offices. Also, the Kala Academy has become the first preference for the people to conduct any International Film Festivals in Goa.

Another important feature is the jetty at the backside of the riverfront connecting the river to the academy. With a beautiful view just like in the movies, the jetty was the entry for the celebrities visiting the International Film Festival. After creating beautiful sceneries and being a favorite love spot for the people visiting the great Kala Academy the function of the jetty came to an end recently due to corrosion.

Being a part of the culture and art of Goa and being art itself. The government decided to break down a part of the structure which is the open-air theatre. After many reviews and reconsiderations, they agreed not to be demolished and also agreed to repair it. This is a building where the habituate of the people overpowers the design instead of the vice versa. By creating wonderful memories and promoting cultural significance the building always stands unique.

Also, read The Center for Development Studies, Trivandrum – A Laurie Baker Masterpiece

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Why Kala Academy by Charles Correa should be considered as architectural heritage

Different world agencies, architects, and the public define and interpret a heritage building in different ways. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation ( UNESCO ), in the Convention concerning the protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage 1972 , defines cultural heritage for groups of buildings as, “Groups of separate or connected buildings which, because of their architecture, their homogeneity or their place in the landscape, are of outstanding universal value from history, art or science.” And cultural sites as, “Works of man or the combined works of nature and man, and areas including archaeological sites which are of outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic , ethnological or anthropological point of view.”

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), GOI, says, “heritage building includes any building which requires preservation for historical, architectural, artisanry, aesthetic, cultural , environmental, and/or ecological purposes.” For a layman, a heritage building is usually that which is old, just like architecture= construction and interior design= carpentry. To be aware of culturally important buildings or sites, and what are those factors that make them cultural heritage, we need to stop time and move back to look at history and future at the same time in conjunction with the building.

An introduction to the Philosophy of Architecture in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mentions an idea of how western philosophy, which includes the history of aesthetics, has very little discourse on architecture, the experience of architecture, or its social ramifications. Through my limited experience, I have seen pockets of discussion on philosophical issues prompted by architecture, but nothing mainstream. Architecture seems to have failed to attract sustained, detailed attention—particularly compared to other art forms like literature or painting. But when one reads Charles Correa and his ideologies through his written work and studies his buildings, it gives a fresh perspective on why architecture may not prompt philosophical issues or larger philosophical debates. The ‘un-building’, a term used many times by Correa himself, is the epitome of his architectural expression; that is to serve the people’s inherent lifestyle and enhance their routine functioning, rather than to impose upon them a monument to which they can only revere but not relate. There are two ways you can look at a building, either see it for what it is or (un) see it for what it makes you do.

Charles Correa’s Kala Academy in Goa has been a building of historic architectural, cultural, and social importance in the entire country, being the only diverse cultural academy to offer western, classical, and mixed arts courses. The building itself embodies the ideologies of ‘ India’s greatest architect ’- Charles Correa. The Kala Academy became a people’s favorite instantly when it was completed in 1983. The building is a unique example of giving back to society. Even in its expansive built-form, it draws the pedestrian streets into the internal open-to-sky courtyards and through the internal streets onto the Mandovi river edge; not before a pit-stop at the cafe for some chai-samosas. Charles designs the building for a wanderer, he directs you in his subtleties to explore the space on your way to the river-front; something that you would naturally do at the place it is located. The first Chief Minister of Goa, Dayanand Bandodkar, and Mr. Pratapsingh Rane, an MLA from Bandodkar’s party became part of the founding members of the Kala Academy Society, a not-for-profit society of the arts formed to promote the local and the international art-forms without prejudice. A built-entity was imagined, that would be unique and general at the same time; a center at the confluence of Eastern and Western culture.

Getting back to why I started this piece with an explanation of a heritage building. Where does the heritage, attached to it, come from? Is it necessary for a building tagged as heritage, to have persevered a few hundred years? Here I will list ten reasons why Kala should be considered architectural heritage.

1. Site Location and Orientation | Kala Academy

The site where Kala Academy sits was a beachfront for old Goan houses where the locals caught fish and watched the time pass along with the barges and the ships. While planning this building, Charles Correa ever so excitedly seemed to have involved himself to make sure that this way of life of the people stays unaffected by the built form but only intensifies it. The view of the Reis Magos fort across the river and the river walk with its lighthouse and the now-demolished jetty was synonymous with Goa , and the Kala Academy itself, an iconic building for architecture students, is always at the tip of their tongues. One of the key reasons to preserve it is that it never imposed itself on the location and never made it exclusive, making it free for every citizen of the world to experience. Kala Academy’s East-West orientation allows the warm wind from the Arabian Sea to cool down at the green buffer of vegetation before entering the building, occupying the internal streets and moving out through the open to sky courtyards and flowing towards the Campal promenade. It is as if the building has blocked none of the air-flow to the city of Panjim. 

2. Human Scale

With nothing to suggest monumentality, the entire building is low with just three floors and furthers the horizontality of the structure. This low rise mass maintains the human scale and draws your attention away from the building and to the simple act of transiting from the footpath to inside a building without being self-conscious of entering. According to Almeida, Sarto, and Jaimini Mehta , “It makes an otherwise serious public institution seem less ‘institutional’ and more relaxed and appropriate.” This was the first building Correa built in Goa, and he seemed to be in-tune with what the people need rather than what architects usually think people should have.

3. Internal Streets

Most of the spaces inside the Kala Academy are heterogeneous, and the transition between the spaces is through corridors that resemble the streets of old Goa. Correa sketched the murals on the walls that create the illusion of the Goan streets and Bhiwandker, a signboard painter, blew it up and brought it to life. Something that adds to the cultural reference of the region within which the building is. 

4. Courtyards

Kala Academy’s courtyards and open-to-sky spaces were a continuation of Correa’s ideologies of the building in a tropical climate like India’s. Correa’s theory about those elements of living which are predominantly performed outside in our country’s tropical climate, as compared to the climate of the west (which is mostly cold), is an important factor that affects the architects throughout developing countries. It makes them build on the idea and choose appropriate climatic responses rather than copy the developed countries. The pergola at the entrance symbolically references the trees over Campal’s road under which all activity happens. This is a valuable asset to show when modernism in the world was picking up steam, an Indian was modernizing vernacular concepts of India.

5. Building Program | Kala Academy

A simple orthogonal grid makes up the plan, within which there is an interplay in the volume of spaces. Kala Academy’s program is with spaces such as Exhibition halls, open-air theatres, auditorium, meeting rooms, teaching rooms, lounges, cafeteria, the black box, rehearsal rooms, and admin block. The ground floor is dedicated to the public and the first floor to the academic and administration, thus creating a building that gives the plot back to the people by allowing them to roam freely on the ground floor without disturbing the routine activities of the cultural center. This very embedded factor of planning is rare to see in architecture, especially cultural centers, to be as inclusive as to give up prime real estate to the wandering public with no formal work at the center itself.

6. Auditorium Acoustics

Correa uses modern-vernacular techniques to design the auditorium which was to play-stage to Western and Indian artists. With this preface, the Dinanath Mangeshkar auditorium is designed with projections on the walls which are neatly disguised to look like old Goan theatre balconies with caricatures drawn on them by Mario Miranda . The Acoustic qualities of these are seen when Indian classical music needs more reverberation time, draperies behind the caricatures are pulled up and dropped down for Western music which needs less reverberation time in space.

7. Building Material

Local building material is the most sustainable as it has survived the climate of the region for centuries. Regional essence was important to Correa, and he used laterite stone, which is abundant in Goa, to emphasize Goa’s regional flavor. It not only sustains the building but also gives it a cultural identity, connecting it to the region. Poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote recognizes the classic features of Correa’s architecture present in Kala Academy and adds, “And let us not forget the laterite that forms its key medium—it articulates the flesh and blood of Goa’s architecture, it comes from the soil of Goa, from the soul of Goa.”

8. Campus Development—Campal Promenade and the Riverwalk

Kala Academy set the tone for development around it; giving a much-needed boost to the footpaths and the tree-covered streets of Campal on one side and the Mandovi Riverwalk development on the other side, to include street furniture and lighting along with landscaping to allow people to enjoy the riverside in the mornings and the evenings. Correa’s idea of facilitating the people’s way of life and the route from the street side to the riverside made this happen. In The New Landscape , Correa wrote, “The pavements along the seafront in Bombay are the great community spaces of the city. We should generate many more such promenades. They are the heart of the social life of the tropical temperate zones.” Looking at what he made on either side of Kala Academy in Goa, he showed us, through his work, what he was talking about. 

9. Cultural Identity

The cultural identity of Kala Academy comes from many places. First, the many maestros who have performed in the Dinanath Mangeshkar auditorium, which includes many Indian and foreign performers performing Indian and Western classical music in the auditorium that ingeniously accommodates both acoustics very well. Second, thousands of local artists who have started their careers in this very place. Not to mention the tightly contested state Tiatr and Mando competitions, all running to house-full capacities in the 954-seat auditorium. Adding to the culture is Goa’s very own cartoonist Mario Miranda, who drew his signature cartoons inside the auditorium on virtual balconies. The International Film Festival of India (IFFI) is held every year with film screenings and plays happening here and in the Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), housed in the Inox campus across the road. In 2004 there was even a jetty made at the riverside to receive celebrities housed in Sinquerim through the water-way. The heritage of this building comes from its cultural importance as an Arts Academy unlike any other in the country, and its architectural importance of inclusivity and focusing on the people rather than the monumentality of the building itself. It submits to the public in a way few other edifices do in modern times. It presents itself as a transition space, a place to wander, explore, introspect, rest, be pensive, be active, and reach somewhere that you wouldn’t expect to reach. In our times, when the architectural signature is characterized by august structures such as the Statue of Unity or the Antilla, a building of utmost inclusivity and submissiveness of the human scale is rare and inconceivable.

10. Charles Correa’s Legacy | Kala Academy

People have written many things about Correa’s buildings and ideologies; the ritualistic pathway, the un-building, the open-to-sky spaces, etc., In a keynote address at the Indian Institute of Planners, Kashmir in 1972, Correa, speaking about Goa says, “The wonderful thing about Goa is that it is a real meeting of East and West… What is far more viable is Goa as a crossroads between Indian and European civilizations. By creating schools and cultural centers—for music, painting, drama, literature, architecture, etc.,—where the best teachers of India are available, we could attract the best from the west. From this confrontation, new music, a new art, might well be born.” In the early 80s, Correa is invited to design what is to be the century’s epitome of a public place in the form of a cultural center, that today, has become a heritage we must conserve into the future to show how it was the first building in Goa to interpret Goan architecture and a true building of the people.

Kala Academy has all the features and conditions to be one of the few modern architectural buildings to be considered as architectural heritage. Inscribed in its internal streets are the voices of every citizen who has wandered through this un-building, unknowingly experiencing one of the most culturally important buildings of our times. Once again, Charles Correa’s magic trick that still resonates 40 yrs later.

Sahil Tanveer is an architect and thinker, who runs a cosmopolitan Architecture studio with work across the country. He believes architecture is all-inclusive and personal. He is continually in search of the unknown, while observing psychology, philosophy, and the influence of culture and society on architecture and design.

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The Open Plan of Conviviality: Kala Akademi, Goa, designed by Charles Correa

• August 12, 2019

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Every place has a program. Homes are shaped around the rhythms of movement and rest we call daily life. Playgrounds are empty so they may be filled by the energy and action of sport. But places can also transcend their conventional programs. They can be much more than the common noun- house, school, post office- that describes (and usually, circumscribes) them. While fulfilling their mandated program, they may also play a role that transcends the common sense of common nouns. This transcendence may be thought of as a core responsibility in some kind of places. For instance, one expects museums, theatres and other such spaces, devoted as they are to joining private utterance to the public, to also become sites of dialogue, and loci of engagement for different players in the city. Sadly, very few places devoted to the arts do that in India. One way in which the majority fail (and a minority succeeds) to transcend their mundane program is through architecture. Part of the successful minority is Kala Akademi, designed by Charles Correa and sited along the river Mandovi in Panjim. The architecture of this artplace (my catch- all term referring to spaces like theatres, museums, and art galleries) is the main source of its potential for transcending the narrow institutional program common to Indian artplaces.

A small confession is in place here. I awoke to the real significance of Kala Akademi’s architectural achievement rather late. Of course, the boldness of its approach was instantly evident when I visited it from Mumbai, where I then lived, in the course of research for a book on the architecture of artplaces in India. Though sprawling wide in comparison with other engaging artplaces like Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, I had found it a place that was easy to soak into. Less a building than a public space roofed by a building, it extended an expansive invitation without lapsing into self-serious monumentality. In fact, there was none of what one tends to associate with the term ‘architecture’. Kala Akademi’s drama lay in its enterable, traversable space, not in sculptural, impenetrable, form. But it was only after I moved to Goa, and began visiting Kala Akademi more regularly, that I began to understand the real nature of its architectural achievement. Three years down the line, it is clear to me that the architecture of Kala Akademi has nudged it towards becoming much more than just another multi-arts complex. I have seen art shows, performances, and films there, of course. But more importantly, I have often chosen to go there, like many others, just for the pleasure of being with a sprinkling of other people in a stimulating public place. Kala Akademi is that scarce resource, a generous and truly convivial space right in the bustle of a small city.

Now that it is there, it appears almost natural that an artplace should be the riverside veranda for a city like Panjim. But, look around anywhere in the country and you realize how rare such a place is. The institutional culture of cultural institutions in India is a fascinating object of study, as of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands. In a moment of frustration, but without compromising our national taste for hyperbole, one may say that the worst aspects of our culture and our institutions seem to come together when we play the two words together.

To put it gently, museums (may their tribe increase), theatres (may their tribe improve), art galleries and multi-art complexes in India are remarkably blasé about winning the affection of the very people who they are built for. Put equally gently, it appears as if the existential stance of the majority of artplaces in India is: I exist, therefore my job is done. This deft (if dubious) conflation of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ finds two expressions that form the ends of a spectrum. The ‘mature’ expression of this philosophy leads to artplaces that take a transactional view of their programme and of their duty towards artists and rasikas: buy the tickets here, that way to the exhibit (or performance), go round the corner to search for the toilets, once you are done, leave, do not loiter (or litter). Sorry, no food, except for fifteen minutes during the ‘interval’.

The other kind of artplace builds on the self-congratulation implicit in the conviction that merely existing is the same as doing your job well. Such an artplace is often snooty, or at least dismissive of all kinds of low-life that throngs to enjoy the goodies of culture it offers. It is devoted to upholding the prestige of culture and also to protecting it from the grubby paws of all those who want a piece of it.

Artplace architecture often offers an eager mirror to these institutional attitudes. Thus the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the Government Museum, Chennai is simply non- committal in its expression. The bare box of a building neither invites you in nor does the default design of the exhibits try to hold your interest. It simply stands there, offering neither a space to linger at its entrance nor any visual pleasure to arrest your flight. Like an employee warming his seat enough so a paycheck lands at his table, the building seeks to fulfill its program by merely existing.

The architecture of more elite spaces like National Centre for the Performing Arts is more purposively directed. Built in the 1980s, it seeks to invoke the fading prestige of an abstract Western modernism by offering ‘pure form’- that is, elegant building blocks that have the minimum differentiation, do not appear very penetrable, and therefore actively refuse us any purchase on their meaning. By opening each of the four main buildings on campus in different directions (and on to three different roads), it also ensures (probably unwittingly) that visitors to each facility never encounter those coming for another one. By looking over the heads of visitors and by disabling contact and solidarity among them, it succeeds in keeping them peripheral to the life of the institution, at bay even, in more ways than one.

Rare is the Indian artplace like Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, that actively reaches out, says ‘come in’, and lets you decide how you want to have a good time. Ivan Illich, implacable critic of institutional culture, has a nice term for the Prithvi kind of institution (De- schooling Society, Pelican Books 1976). He calls it a ‘convivial’ institution, as opposed to another kind that he calls the ‘manipulative’ institution. The difference between these two types, again occupying two ends of a spectrum, is fundamentally about the sense of control and choice given to the user. Convivial institutions, as Illich characterizes them, are basically open in programme within realistic limits. Sidewalks, small bakeries, telephone networks are the examples he invokes. People use them voluntarily. They need neither aggressive advertisement nor force (the way manipulative institutions, like schools do) for people to want to use them. More importantly, convivial institutions involve users in activity rather than reducing them to passive consumers. Not surprisingly therefore, they empower users and help them grow in personal terms. The question then is, what kind of architecture would be supportive of the agenda of conviviality?

The design of Kala Akademi’s public spaces provides some answers. The foundational act of design at Kala Akademi is that of opening up. The architecture of Kala Akademi clears the ground, literally, letting the gaze (and moving feet) sweep clean through from the pavement outside to the river beyond. In principle, this place says it is open to the city. No architectural sign of exclusion- apart from the gate which is kept generously wide and low- is visible from the footpath to discourage us from entering. Indeed quite the opposite. This is a building without a plinth, walls and doors with which to keep the world at bay. The ground simply runs in into the shaded heart of the building and out to the open beyond of the garden and promenade by the river. The building extends a notional porch to the pavement, made suggestively grand by a pergola at the roof level of the first floor. This suggestion of a dramatically welcoming civic ‘porch’ (and not some impenetrable sculptural mass) is the big architectural gesture of the building in the direction of the city.

The gesture is apt, since the Kala Akademi building is fundamentally a pavilion (or unattached porch), where the upper floors housing the academic and administrative spaces form a continuous roof over a sprawling and unenclosed public space at the ground level. A pavilion transcends enclosure, and thereby also the paranoia (and schizophrenia?) of the closed building box. In abjuring walls, it also transcends the strict enforcement of any limited program of use, leaving the dweller of the moment to fashion it anew each time. I have seen films, performances (including my son’s school’s ‘annual day’ programme in the huge open air theatre), and art exhibitions at Kala Akademi. I have also been in a small reading group that appropriated different spaces in the campus for its weekly meetings. And I have watched my son turn the seat-clusters sprinkled across the covered plaza into play-sculptures that may be climbed, jumped off, peeped through, and slid across with a forever incomplete hug. At all times, I have learnt to be amazed at the way the static seat clusters become dynamic people sculptures as bodies perch, nestle and depart.

Openness of space does not itself guarantee an open program. The absence of walls and of enclosure can itself be repressive, as at Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex at Chandigarh, where we find ourselves cast adrift. Places need to have discernible shape and structure. The fragile body- forever breaking out into sweat- needs shelter, seat, and yes, food. The eye likes to make sense of every place, and know what time it is ‘outside’. Most of all however, in a place like Kala Akademi, every one of us hopes for some contact with unknown others. What is the city, and every public place within it, if not a mechanism for putting strangers in touch with each other?

By sheltering an uninterrupted space, Kala Akademi reveals that space can be fruitfully left open in either direction, vertical or horizontal. Where the typical comforting courtyard (an example of vertical openness) gathers a space together towards an inveigled centre, the horizontal freedom of Kala Akademi’s covered plaza prompts us to move away and out towards the gardens, the river and other sun-dappled spaces around. There is no single centre that the architecture sacralises on the ground, and no sense of any agent of the power to say ‘no’ waiting to jump out from behind some wall. Instead, there is a multiplicity of centers in the gridded spread of columns as well as the casual scatter of seat-clusters configured to be minor sculptural presences. These seats are an unusual kindness towards the tiring body, hanging around for the show to start, or restart. Or just plain hanging around with no particular productive end in mind.

When a public space is open in (and to) many senses, and also kind to the body (and being) can urbanity be very far? The canteen (deep inside by the rear garden, but visible very early on through the penetrable covered plaza of the foyer) offers other kindnesses. A beautiful view, breeze from the river, an inside-outside ambiguity (inside because covered, outside because of the breeze, and the dogs and crows who stand by patiently), loose chairs to allow different group-sizes, and food for cheap. The canteen- the only one I have seen that actually begs to be called a café- is where the action is, some action or the other. The late William Whyte, social scientist and student of what makes public spaces tick across the world, put it very simply. People, attract other people, he said. And people come to a place that is kind and hospitable to them. They then bring along other people, and make a place buzz, which in turn makes even more people want to come there. And so on.

A matrix of spatial hospitability encourages people to bring a space like Kala Akademi alive. It invites them to invest their imagination and time to do things within its space that the most creative institutional programmer may never catalyse. These small practices of conversation, argument, dream-selling, solo rehearsal, etc. are the cultural foundations upon which the formal artistic efforts being shaped in the academic spaces on the upper floors (or being presented professionally behind the auditorium walls) will stand or fall. But being inevitably conducted under the radar of the official gaze, these practices- lubricated effectively by cheap, good tea and snacks- populate the fringes of institutional acceptability. They can swing from being ‘simply irrelevant’ to ‘avoidable nuisances’ to ‘possibly subversive’. According to a new and prominently displayed notice, it is no longer legit to use the Kala Akademi canteen for any other purposes than ‘availing of snacks and refreshments’: no unauthorized meetings, no business to be discussed, no nothing, period.

Petition to save Kala Academy

Architecture cannot cure social ills. But it can push for health. This is one government run building that just cannot be locked up, except at its gates as they do during the International Film Festival of India every year. Kala Akademi also shows how much ground architecture can claim for conviviality. Traditions of institutional management, can still win of course. Sometime ago, during a recreational visit to the place, I was amazed to find the large main toilet block locked. Enquiry revealed that an administrative order had decreed that this hitherto taken-for granted-facility would only be kept open while a performance was underway in either the main Dinanath Mangeshkar auditorium or the Black Box. I would have to use the much smaller toilet placed outside the building by the parking lot. I was glad it was not raining. Of course, it probably made perfect sense from many different angles. Except that it went directly against the very welcome writ large over the 80,000 square feet or so of space outside that comparatively small, even if generously red tiled toilet block. The contest for conviviality is on at this artplace (as it always is, everywhere). Watch that space.

The article was first published in Art Connect, Volume 2, Number 2, July- December 2008. Published by India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore.

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Architecture of goa: seeking vision and identity — the current scene.

With Goa, independence from centuries of Portuguese rule, and the subsequent political integration with India, have led to a curious dilemma: While Goa seeks to be part of the larger Indian polity, culturally our society has become more conscious of its Goan identity, and wants to preserve and express it. Like music and literature, architecture has sought to express this "Indian yet Goan" character.

Interestingly, this concept of Goanness is still being evolved; we will 'know' what constitutes Goan architecture only when we see it expressed in temporal forms. A survey of architecture in the forty years since independence shows various strands of this search for expression; this essay, however, will examine not just the present architectural trends but also trends that began to reveal themselves in the last years of Portuguese rule.

In the past, Goa's identity was defined by its beautiful natural environment together with the prevalent Indo-Portuguese and vernacular styles of architecture. Since architecture mirrors local material culture, and there had been little change in that culture for centuries, Goan architecture remained relatively static until the 1960s.

However, a few stray examples of a far different architectural style did crop up. The earliest, the Mandovi Hotel at Panaji, was built to cater to the influx of visitors expected to attend the Exposition of St. Francis Xavier in 1952. There being no architects in Goa then, the hotel brought them in from Bombay, then designed the Mandovi, our first multistoried building, in the Art Deco style then prevalent in that city. The Art Deco style may thus have been a necessary stepping stone to a more robust modernity.

A truly modem building, the original airport terminal at Dabolim, came up in the mid-1950s when Benard Geddes was Goa's Governor. The word "modem" is used here to mean something more particular than "contemporary"; it means the new type of architecture that is contributing to the art of architecture. The designs were prepared in Portugal, as the project was under the Overseas Ministry. Making extensive use of large glass areas, wooden partitions, and hollow block external walls, it was one of the finest small airport buildings in the world. Unfortunately it is now off-limits to the public as it has been taken over by the Naval Air Wing. 

Simple plans, functional design ...

The last few years of Portuguese rule, under Gen. Vassalo e Silva, saw quite a lot of construction undertaken by the government. The Governor, an engineer by profession, indeed several bright architects from Portugal and Goa into the Brigada ; their simple and functional designs made use of the latest structural methods and materials. Examples of this were the one ­room village school, the Junta godowns at Cortalim ferry, the military barracks at Ponda, and the military chapel at Rawanfond, Margao.

The prototype school, rectangular with a small verandah, used hollow-block walls, operable glass louvers, and a reinforced cement concrete roof; a mural of glazed blue decorative tiles flanked the entrance. The simple chapel plan featured a steeply sloping reinforced cement concrete roof slab over hollow-block walls with pre-cast grilles for light and ventilation.

In the same period a plan for Old Goa included landscaping the area between the Se Cathedral and the Born Jesus church and installing a statue of the poet Luis de Camoes. Stating that the facade of Born Jesus was meant to be in exposed laterite, the engineers and architects had the existing plaster stripped off. Now we know that the plastering helped protect the walls from weather and also conformed to the rule that churches had to be painted all white.

Building spurt followed Liberation lull

With Liberation, an initial lull was followed by a spurt in building very undistinguished Bombay-style storied apartment blocks, a way of living hitherto alien to Goa. The architects were either from Bombay or had been trained there. At that time even the very poor in Goa had a house to live in; it might have consisted of just mud walls and a coconut thatched roof, but it was still a house. Middle-class families had good homes in salubrious environments in the villages. But with good schools, cinemas, and other recreational facilities coming up in towns, and the public transportation system very poor, people opted to move into the towns.

Thus, apartment blocks proliferated. This brought in a breed of developers who, to maximize their profits, built cramped flats with rooms like cubby holes, which unfortunately were quickly snapped up; and so it continues till today. Still, two notable exceptions can be listed. The first group-housing scheme of its kind in Goa, at the Patto Bridge in Panaji, consisted of individual two-storied houses in a well-planned layout. Another exception, the Cosme Matias Menezes building at Margao, had well-planned spacious flats on each floor and the company's retail outlet at ground level.

With storied blocks coming up, sloping mangalore-tiled roofs gave way to flat reinforced cement concrete slab-terraced roofs. This trend carried over to individual bungalows as well. Though apartment blocks in general were very undistinguished, there was much innovation in other building types.

In the 1960s, the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary at Siridao was the first to break away from the prevailing Indo-Portuguese style. It followed a simple cruciform plan; the equally simple external elevations expressed the volumes within. The church with its attached bell tower sits surrounded by fields and a waterway.

Photogenically right, but not right for Goa

During this same period, three buildings strongly influenced by Le Corbusier came up: the Minor Seminary at Pilar, the Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industries at Panaji, and the Carmelite Monastery Church at Margao. The first two, with their elevational treatment and structures for recreational activities on the roof, were photogenically very appropriate for architectural magazines, but actually not suited for Goa. The exposed concrete walls accumulated heat and became badly disfigured after the rains due to fungus formation.

Graphically designed fenestration enhanced the Carmelite church's very sculptural quality. This building was planned according to the new liturgy being introduced in the Catholic Church; the fan-shaped seating focused on the altar, which had brilliant light flooding it from windows set high in the bell tower.

The Don Bosco Church at Panaji, built in the 1970s, also had fan-shaped seating; roof beams converging over the altar reinforced the focusing effect. Later, when the church at Bambolim was built in the 1990s, the lightness of the wonderfully airy space within it was emphasized by the Mangalore-tiled roofing over a light steel structure. Because of its proximity to the national highway, a high blank wall serves as the roadside facade against which the altar sits. From this, its highest point, the roof slopes down gently on all sides.

Stylized temple columns, rooted in history

No comparable breakaway from the traditional has taken place in Hindu temple architecture. Existing temples have often been subjected to inappropriate and tawdry additions and alterations; and even new temples are being built without seeking to find a way whereby temple architecture would speak to our new and very different age.

For a notable exception we must turn to the Shree Salisthan Gokarn Partagali Jeevotham Math in South Goa. Here, the contemporary stylized forms of the columns in verandahs and courtyards have been derived from the post-Chalukyan period, while the roof's pyramidal shapes speak of local temple architecture.

With tourism flourishing, hotels have proliferated, especially along the coast. Ironically, this sector did not innovate and explore elements rooted in the cultural milieu; instead, seeking to attract rich Western tourists, the luxury hotels indulged in ostentatious decor bordering on the ridiculous when they depicted a distant period in history or even another exotic country.

Gulf expatriates brought new wealth into Goa, resulting in increased demand for planned housing developments. Unfortunately, tasteless and overly decorative bungalows took centre stage, vying to outdo each other.

By the 1970s, the modem International Style had come to be identified with the functional but characterless 'box', devoid of all cultural references; fortunately, it never found a niche in Goa.

Hotel all clustered Village, art academy as open ...street

The search for an appropriate architectural response will thus have to be looked for elsewhere, and the answer could be in the popular Hotel Cidade de Goa in Dona Paula, a serious attempt to reinterpret Goa's vernacular architectural language, by overlaying it with Portuguese urbanism. The plan-form is a simple parallel wall structure placed perpendicular to the contours; subtle variations in the projections of the facades create an impression of a clustered Mediterranean village.

Another example, built around the same time, is the Kala Academy, a large cultural institution on the banks of the Mandovi at Panaji. The Kala project undertook significant innovations in spatial organization. A modernist plan-form of post and beam construction on an orthogonal grid offered the architect the necessary variation in dimensions demanded by a programme that makes use of several performance halls, exhibition galleries, informal public gathering places, etc.

The relatively low rise mass is spread horizontally and organized around an innovative ground plan with an open 'street' going through the entire building. This allows one to enter the building without being self-conscious about entering; it makes an otherwise serious public institution seem less "institutional" and more relaxed and appropriate.

Both these projects are significant as they created an identity of contemporary Goa and did not merely express a commonly held idea of what Goa is all about. In a contemporary context, they reinterpreted elements — the clustered village and the public street that have only an indirect association with Goa, derived mainly from the Portuguese past. However, they speak of a large and remembered part of Goa and to that extent are credible and successful attempts at defining and expressing our identity.

These lessons were lost with the advent of the Post-Modernist style. Exuberant columns, pediments, entablatures and the like were pasted on to facades giving rise to an architecture that would be more appropriate in Disneyland. Fortunately this trend seems to be petering out and the task of identity formation goes on. 

It can be seen particularly in three projects: the hotels Nilaya at Arpora, the Pousada Tauma at Calangute, and the Coconut Creek at Bogmalo. Together they represent a conscious attempt at organizing this type of building in a new way by splitting it into smaller pavilions spread around the site, interspersed with lush Goan landscape and water. One sees the whole only as so many fragmentary images that are still in harmony with nature; landscape becomes a very important partner in place-making. The boundaries between what is nature and what is man-made are blurred, as is the case in rural Goa.

The "Houses of Goa" Museum, located on a small triangular traffic island within private property, is a highly personal statement by its architect, and houses a private collection of elements of Goan residential architecture. The building flares out from its small base creating a projecting ship-like prow where two bulging sidewalls meet, so locals have nicknamed it the "Titanic". The flaring-out provides additional exhibition space on each successive upper floor. These areas are further augmented by floors projecting out of the building, supported by metal pipe brackets.

The museum's bold character transcends the limitations of its small size. It seeks no justification on the basis of functionalism, or the application of a new technology. Rather, it presents itself as a possible icon of Goa, with a " take it or leav e it" attitude; it presents a bold and confident Goa.

Charles Correa: Cidade de Goa

Architecture for Humans — Why Kala Academy Should not be taken down

Janice Viegas

“Panaji’s storied Kala Academy, designed by the legendary architect Charles Correa is threatened with demolition by the Goan government.” — livemint.com

This is an excerpt from an article I read a few hours ago. I am now sitting at my desk dragging out three-year-old information from my overfull hard-disk… why? Because like so many others, who I’m sure share my opinion, I honestly believe that Kala Academy deserves to withstand the test of time. Kala Academy is a cultural centre located along the banks of the river Mandovi in Panjim, which is the capital of Goa, India’s smallest state. It was designed nearly 40 years ago by Ar. Charles Correa, who himself was of Goan origin. Correa is respected nationally as well as internationally for his extraordinary work in the field of Architecture. His most notable work includes the Champalimaud Foundation Centre in Lisbon, The Jeevan Bharati Building at Connaught Place, New Delhi, and many others.

I am a former student of Goa College of Architecture, and the reason I care so especially for Kala Academy, is because I truly think it is one of the very few buildings in Goa’s modern history that is sensitive to the needs of its users, this conclusion was arrived at painstakingly, through multiple observations made as a part of my final year dissertation and so I believe I have an understanding of the structure from a slightly different perspective. While there are many reasons why the building is perfect and should not be modified. In this article, I will focus on its value from the “design in tune with human behaviour” perspective.

Following the declaration by the state government in the recent past to demolish part of this structure, I feel compelled to share the conclusions that were systematically arrived at as a part of my dissertation. In the paragraphs that follow I will try to summarize the numerous lessons on the art of creating architecture that is humble, effective and human, all of which I have learnt from the time I have spent wandering around the courtyards of this truly people-friendly building.

HUMAN BEINGS AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT

Architecture can be thought of as the human act of highlighting and suppressing elements of the environment so as to benefit human life. Builders of shelter achieve this goal by building — up and tearing down various aspects of the natural environment. If the art of building, can align itself to human needs especially the physical and psychological ones, then the quality of human life stands a chance of great improvement.

Innumerable research studies and experiments carried out in the field of human behaviour point out to the failure of our modern urban environments to care for our basic and immediate social and psychological needs thereby regarding city life monotonous and depressing. In my dissertation, I have attempted to probe into the reason why Kala Academy manages to attract so many people effortlessly and how it is able to induce the notion of comfort among its users so as to encourage them to revisit the area over and over again, not only to attend functions but also as a place for informal meetings.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

Based on the theories formulated in the books mentioned in the reference section of this article I was able to draw up an analytical framework that I could use to conduct my study. Described below are the theories referred to for the purpose of documentation and analysis.

Part 1: Setting the extent of the area to be studied.

According to Simon Unwin, people and objects introduce geometry in the world just by being. Everybody has around them what might be called the ‘circle of presence which constitutes ‘The Circle of Visibility’, ‘The Circle of place’, and ‘The Circle of Touch-ability’. He states that much of Architecture, from prehistoric times to the present, has been concerned with asserting, defining, amplifying, and molding these ‘Circles of Presence’.

I have used this theory while I defined the spaces to study at Kala Academy. Considering the fact that I had set out to primarily study how Architecture Shapes Human Behaviour, I used Unwin’s theory to limit the extent of the area to be studied to the ‘Circle of Presence’. This was done by identifying visual and physical barriers that defined the borders of ones ‘circle of presence’.

As can be seen in the figure above, ‘the circle of presence’, is comprised of all the public areas in the structure, these have been subdivided into smaller sections based on their physical form and functionality. The grey defines the entrance court, red the lobby area, yellow the canteen space, green the open lawn area, purple the wooded foreground and beige the walkway along the river.

Part 2: Categorizing and Understanding Common Human Behaviour Patterns

Through Jan Gehl’s description of human behaviour in relation to space, one may conclude that there are three broad categories of human behaviour, namely walking, pausing and resting and within this, there are numerous ways in which a person may manifest himself in space. I used Gehl’s broad categorization of human behavioural patterns to catalogue my own observations and inferences. While I made these observations, I paid particular attention to the nuances in behavioural patterns displayed by people, once inside the premises of Kala Academy. I realized later on, that this informed me of how Kala Academy, being a recreational building, worked in a way to mirror the same leisurely spirit within the people that inhabited it.

Reality versus perception in Movement:

Gehl says, that a street corresponds to a linear pattern of movement in a human, while a square is associated with a broader visual field that encourages a person to scan the space, he/she is in, thus potentially inducing a pause. Straight monotonous pathways translate in human perception as longer distances while paths divided into stages are perceived as having a smaller distance even though the actual distance might be numerically the same.

A place to pause:

According to Gehl, when people arrange themselves in an open space they usually congregate at the edges of that space, this he suspects is done to avoid being singled out of the crowd and placed at the centre of a large empty space. He also states that when one chooses to pause, in order to linger or wait, rather than just as a functional requirement such as to tie a shoelace, humans usually make the conscious effort to find a good place to stand. He further says that a good place is characterized by a possibility to view/survey multiple activities at once. This he says is done so that the person using the space is the observer and not the observed.

Where to rest:

Gehl observes that when human beings choose to sit/rest they look out for multiple factors such as the situation, the climate and space itself since the activity of sitting/resting tends to last for a longer duration of time than the act of pausing. He points out that resting spaces that provide their user with multiple options so as to engage and dis-engage with the activity they are performing easily and at will, are better preferred by humans as a place for rest. According to Himanshu Burte, safety, environmental comfort, perceptual comfort, physical comfort and the possibility for meaningful activity all contribute to making a space occupiable.

DOCUMENTATION AND OBSERVATION

I could ramble on about the techniques I came across and used to document human behaviour in a public space, however, that information could be the content of a whole new article itself. To cut short, I spent several days observing people’s behavioural patterns in Kala Academy with respect to where they choose to pause, walk and rest. I then documented these by counting, mapping, tracing, looking for traces, performing test walks, and through candid photography.

Once the counting and the mapping were complete, I overlaid the documented information in terms of graphs and maps, so as to single out common patterns of human behaviour in space. This formed the basis for the quantitative analysis. I used the candid shots to formulate the qualitative analysis of this study. Documented below is a summary of the observations made.

It appears that in Kala Academy movement patterns through the building are rather fast paced near the entrance and slow down significantly as in the lobby area and further into the premises.

It may be noticed that people largely pause along zones that transition from one space to another, at spots of orientation, at anchors such as trees or other architectural elements, apart from the obvious functional pauses that occur.

People largely sit where ever the opportunity presents itself when they sit for leisure but, when people sit to perform an activity, they are selective of the choice of space they use.

ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS

Once I possessed the required qualitative and quantitative information, I proceeded to compare this with the theories and suggestions for well-designed spaces for human beings as suggested by the literature I had been reading. Following are some of the conclusions arrived at, with respect to this inference.

Kala Academy is a building that is highly non-restrictive in its approach to the people it serves. It is well balanced in its disposition of security; it subtly lets an individual feel safe without making its presence felt, by means of widening one’s field of vision through the use of large interconnected open areas. Hence, the mode of surveillance is personal and passive.

As far as movement within a space is concerned, Kala Academy influences the speed and direction of a person in its vicinity. It does so by modulating its elements so as to break up the monotony, which in turn reduces the speed of walking. This can be seen in the pattern that human movement follows from the entrance to the lobby area at Kala Academy, while the entrance area is left largely open and without any elements, as one approaches the lobby, planters, sitting space and columns are used to break up the space. In addition, the lobby area subtly singles one’s arrival into the building itself by means of the pergola first and then the low coffered ceiling. It further reinforces a sense of direction through its flow of spaces and the unobstructed focal point, that is a view of the river Mandovi, at the end of the path. One must bear in mind that in doing so it delicately handles the two opposing notions of ‘reinforcing direction’, and ‘promoting lingering’.

I found, through my daily observations, that Kala Academy encouraged people to pause often, it did this by breaking down larger volumes into smaller ones thereby introducing a sense of transition from one space to the next which is where most of the pausing/lingering occurred. This can be seen in multiple areas, such as the edge between the entrance and the lobby area, the lobby area and the canteen area, the canteen and the wooded open area, the wooded area and the walkway by the river. It also very ingeniously created points of orientation such as the edge of the canteen area where people often stood to survey, so as to plan where to go next. This surveying of all available options is only possible owing to the fact that most of the probable destinations are visible from any given point in the public area of the building.

All the individual built and un-built spaces work together to complement each other and are especially well-coordinated in terms of providing shelter from the climatic conditions. Kala Academy invites its users to enjoy both, the active environment that is comprised largely of the natural elements around it and the passive environment that is the structure itself by morphing the two into an indistinguishable whole.

In addition, every public space in Kala Academy promotes lingering since it is open, transparent and clearly visible to the potential user. It invites users into it at any time of the day regardless of there being an activity to especially draw the crowds in. This, in turn, speaks volumes about the building being a truly civic space that encourages the coming together and intermingling of people from various walks of life in a leisurely environment, something any cultural centre should strive to be.

What I could infer, from my numerous visits to Kala Academy was, that the best environment is created, neither by screening off the outside world from the inside, nor by overexposing ourselves to the vastness of space, but rather by creating a balanced harmony between these two opposing concepts.

Kala Academy is low lying humble sort of building and this along with its informally defined flowing courtyards lends the building a friendly and welcoming demeanor. This two-storied building is human in its scale and hence does not seek to compete for dominance with its visitor but rather guides him graciously through its variety of comfort zones.

By the time I had arrived at the end of my dissertation semester, I was haunted by the same question that had nudged me to take up this particular topic in the first place. Can architecture be purposefully designed to strengthen certain human behaviours? The answer, of course, has always been yes, however somewhere in the language of designed architecture the true element of humanness seems to have gotten lost in modern times. Kala Academy proved to be a striking example of how we might find this humanness and use it more often. It is one such building, that has achieved all its goals of being a successful cultural centre, while also serving as an example of sensible and humanly relatable architecture. While providing shelter, comfort and entertainment to its users, it has also inspired hundreds of architects and future architects to re-evaluate their design priorities so as to be able to contribute more effectively to the society that they live in. It is for all these reasons that Kala Academy should not be torn apart or modified.

Jan Ghel (1987) — Life in Between Buildings: Using Public Space 1 (Jo. Koch, Trans) New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold

Jan Ghel, Savree. B & Springer (2013) — How to Study Public Life. Washington, D.C; Island Press.

Edward T Hall (1956) — The Hidden Dimension. Anchor Books Edition.

Himanshu Burte (2008) — Space for Engagement: The Indian Art place and a Habitational Approach to architecture. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Simon Unwin (1997) — Analysing Architecture

Written by Janice Viegas

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KALA ACADEMY GOA -case study

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4.1 Quantitative Data Analysis and result:

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the results of the data analysis

that was gathered through literature review and live case studies.

4.2 Live case study:

To understand the relationship between a museum and an academy

4.2.1 Live Case Study-1:

Kala Academy

Location : Goa

Architect : Charles Correa

Building Type : Institution

Site Area : 6.3acres

Site Gradient : Gentle Slope

Situated at Campal, Panaji along the banks of river Mandovi. The area

has mixed land use with a military hospital across the road, and a cricket

ground and a park on either side.

Regular buses connecting Panaji and the academy are available.

Dabolim airport, 35 km.

Nearest railway station is Madgao, 53 km.

It is the venue of international film festival of India. The Goa kala

academy established in 1969 is the prime institution for promotion of

art and culture in Goa. It is a vibrant representation of the culture and

art of the people of Goa this is expressed in the staggering amount and

variety of cultural programmes held in its premises.

The site is flat, except for a gentle slope at the river edge .the

total site area comes to around 6.3 acres.

There are four entries to the site. Boat jetty provided on the river side.

The coverage is about 40% the pedestrian and vehicular systems are

well defined. The active area includes the cafeteria, the garden and the

Figure 4.2.1.a

amphitheatre. The site is divided into main building service building,

muktangan, parking area, the exhibition space.

Figure 4.2.1.b

Figure 4.2.1.c

Figure 4.2.1.d

Figure 4.2.1.e

Figure 4.2.1.f

Building -style & character:

* Kala academy building has been designed by ar. Charles correa. He has

given prime importance to the process of moving through the spaces in

a building.

* The built form has been kept low ranging from one to three floors.

* This is further enhanced by the use of parapet walls for upper floors,

which emphasize horizontally.

* The 'pergola 'above the entrance, which acts as an extension to the

foyer of the main auditorium and amphitheatre.

* Use of wafer slabs and parapet walls are special feature of the

* Extensive use of specially designed seating.

* The interior walls are painted with pictures mostly depicting

konkanise culture and create illusion.

* The building acts as a tunnel between the city and the river.

Building Level Zoning:

* The building is divided into three zones:

1- public, 2-adminisration, and 3-academic

* They are provided at different levels so as to avoid conflict between

these zones

Figure 4.2.1.g

Figure 4.2.1.h

Figure 4.2.1.i

Figure 4.2.1.j

* The ground floor includes facilities like auditorium, Preview Theater,

amphitheatre, art gallery, and canteen etc, where public entry is invited

* The first and second floors include academic and administration

facilities.

*There are three groups of people using the building:

Staff, students, audience

* The circulation has been linked to the zoning and has been segregated

by separating them through levels - ground floor for audience functions

and first and second floor for staff and students with a necessary degree

of inter linking.

Figure 4.2.1.k

Figure 4.2.1.l

Facilities Provided:

1) D.M Kalamandir

3) Mini OAT

4) Black Box

5) Rehearsal Room

6) Art Gallery

7) Meeting Room

8) Guest Room

9) Preview Theatre

10) Cafeteria

11) Library

12) Teaching Studio

13) Green Room

14) Kitchen

15) Administration

16) Reception

D.m Kala Mandir (A. C Auditorium)

Seating capacity - 1000

Stage opening - 9.6 m

Area - 1300 sq.m

Orchestra pit- 7.2 x 2.1 m

* The auditorium allows a variety of acoustical conditions ranging from

speech, plays to sitar recitals and orchestral arrangements

*The changes are made by manipulating absorbent materials placed

within inner compartments hidden from view above this ceiling.

* The walls of the auditorium are painted illusions of an old goan theatre,

* Behind the figures in the boxes real curtains may be pulled to reduce

reverberation time in space.

* The stage is 80cm high from the first row.

* The raking height varies from 10-20 cm.

Figure 4.2.1.m

Figure 4.2.1.n

Mini open air theatre:

* The mini oat seats 300 people.

* It is mainly used as an outdoor classroom and meeting space however

small performances are also held here.

* The oat has a tread of 85cm and a rise of 45 cm. the steep risers give it

excellent sightlines.

* The farthest seat is 6m away and no amplication required.

* Two aisles run along either end. The width is 120cm and

* The steps have 15cm risers and 28 cm treads.

* The stage is square is shape and has an area of 7.5 x 7.5 m

Open air amphitheatre:

Seating capacity (no chair) - 2000

Seating capacity (chair) - 1312

Proscenium opening - 15m

Depth from curtain line- 12m

* The amphitheatre is of double herringbone shape.

* There is entry from road main lobby and the restaurant area.

* The stage is raised at 75cm above the ground floor level

(eye level of the first row)

* Two seating rakes provided. The lower seats have a rise of 30 cm and

tread of 100 cm while higher ones have a rise of 45 cm giving adequate

Figure 4.2.1.o.i

Figure 4.2.1.o.ii

Figure 4.2.1.o.iii

Figure 4.2.1.p.i

Figure 4.2.1.p.ii

sight lines.

* Acoustics are good as the seats block out noise from the road side and

the stage blocks out noise from the river side.

* The seating capacity is 200. Area - 175 sq.m

* It is used for experimental productions, music concerts, meetings and

amateur performances.

* It can be used as a recording studio.

* A control room and a green room provided.

* A black box lobby is also provided.

Administration:

Administrative area is on the first floor. The area divided into closed and

open cabinets total area comes to around 500 sq.m.

Figure 4.2.1.q

Figure 4.2.1.r

Figure 4.2.1.s

Figure 4.2.1.t

Preview Theatre:

* Capacity of 24.

* Used during iffi for special screening. Has got a jury room and

projector room attached.

* Particle board has been used for acoustical effect.

Art gallery:

* Running wall space - 30 x 1.50 mts approx

* Carpet area of gallery - 90sq.mts approx.

* When exhibitions are not happening painting of children are

* The exhibits are displayed on the wall on four sides.

* Lighting features are very normal no facility to hold a good exhibition.

*A track is provided on all the walls, where the hook is given for hanging

the paintings.

* The paintings are hanged on the hook, it may not look nice in the

context of exhibition but its looks simple as the building context

* Cove lightings are provided for the gallery the focusing of the light can

be adjusted but it does not serve the purpose of focusing any painting.

* Since the intensity of the light is less, the light is spread on the wall.

Figure 4.2.1.u

Figure 4.2.1.v

Figure 4.2.1.w

Other Facilities:

Library - 135 sq.m

* Library is in proximity with mini oat.

* Books are raked in glass shelves

Cafeteria - 100 capacity

* Square table are provided each with 4 seats

* 3 sides open in to the outdoor landscape

* It is accessible from all theatre meeting room - 45 sq.m

*C area of the room 7.30 x 6.15 sq.mts

* Room has one big table and six chairs

Guest room - 53 sq.m

* Room with two beds with attached bath and geyser

and furniture

Teaching studio:

* All the music studios are of the same size 3.3 x 2.6 meters.

* Central air conditioning is provided for all class rooms.

* Acoustically treated classrooms with the same type of padding

Figure 4.2.1.x

Figure 4.2.1.y

Figure 4.2.1.z

Figure 4.2.1.aa

provided for the walls and ceilings.

* Three walls are faced with linen material and glass wool, the rest is

paneled with wood particle board

* The service buildings (ac plant and generator room) are provided on the

western corner of the site no way disrupting the normal functioning of

the building.

* Two separate service entries have been provided. One to the generator

room and the other on the eastern corner of the site.

* The eastern entry caters to the need of the amphitheatre and the

Figure 4.2.1.ab

Figure 4.2.1.ac

Figure 4.2.1.ad

Figure 4.2.1.ae

Figure 4.2.1.af

Figure 4.2.1.ag

Figure 4.2.1.ah

* A loading deck has also been provided here

* The septic tank is provided underneath the garden.

Parking Facilities:

*Parking facilities is provided on the south-eastern side.

*Nearly 250 public parking are provided.

*Special VIP and staff parking provided.

*The beautiful lawns form the main part of the site. Trees Are provided

aptly at the front side of the building.

*Specially designed benches and lamp posts line the path Along the

river side.

* The layout and the building zoning provided are Excellent has brought

in a different overall treatment.

* Good acoustical treatment

* The flow of spaces has resulted in a good built-open relationship.

* Good use of site features has successfully made the public spaces

interesting by use of sculptures, paintings, seatings etc.

* The cafeteria is the most active space with good view to the river.

* Vehicular and pedestrian ways properly defined.

* Service blocks are separated

* Security measures provided are minimum.

* Signage provided is minimum.

Figure 4.2.1.ai

Figure 4.2.1.aj

Figure 4.2.1.ak

Figure 4.2.1.al

Figure 4.2.1.am

* The trees have to some extent blocked the view to the river

* Public spaces too large.

Area Statement:

1. D.M Kalamandir :1300sq.m

a,Total Seating :977

b,Proscenium Stage Opening :9.6Mts

c,Expandable :11.4Mts

d,Proscenium Height :4.5Mts e,Depth

From Curtain Line :12.6Mts

f,Appearance Stage Depth :2.7Mts

g,Orchestra Pit :7.2 X 2.1Mts

h,Stage Height From First Row :.8Mts

2. Open Air Auditorium :1750Sqm

a,Seating (Chair) :1312 nos

b,Seating (no Chair) :2000

c,Proscenium Opening :15Mts

d,Appearance Stage Depth :2.7Mts

3. Mini Theater (Open Air) :340sq.m

a,Seating (Chair) :215 nos

b,Seating (No Chair) :300 nos

c,Tread :.85Mts

d,Riser :.45Mts

e,Aisle Width :1.2Mts

f,Steps (Tread) :.28Mts

g,Steps (Riser) :.15Mts

h,Stage :7.5 X 7.5Mts

I,Farthest Seat :6Mts

4. Black Box :175sqm

a,Seating (Chair) :150 nos

b,Seating (no chair) :200 nos

5. Preview Theatre :45sqm

a,Capacity :24 nos

6. Administration :500sqm

7. Rehearsal Hall :150sqm

a,Seating (chair) :100 nos

b,seating (No Chair) :200 nos

8. Meeting Room :7.3 X 6.15sqm

9. Library :135sqm

10. Cafeteria :450sqm

11. Guest Room :53sqm

12. Art Gallery :150sqm

a,Running Wall Space :48 X 1.5Mts

b,Mobile Display :4.2 X 1.5Mts (3nos)

13. Class Room :8.6sqm

a,Vocal Class Room :1.1sqm/Student

b,Instrumental Class Room :1.8sqm/Student

14. Car Parking :2000sqm

STATE ENVIRONMENTAL APPRAISAL COMMITTEE GOA...Opposite to Kala Academy DB Road Panjim, Goa. DISASTER MANAGEMENT PLAN ... The site is located at the centre of Panaji city at the commercial

Sr. II No. 18 · the Constitution of Rajiv Gandhi Kala Mandir, Ponda--Goa, the Government is pleased to appoint Shri Uday B. Dangui, Ponda-Goa as Vice-Chairman of Rajiv Gandhi Kala

ACBI NEWS BULLETIN - acbindia.org NEWS - March 2018.pdf · and will be held at Kala Academy, Panjim, Goa from 24th to 27th December 2018. All important information and notices pertaining

CITIZEN’S CHARTER DIRECTORATE ART AND CULTURE - Goa · of Goa : Through three major organizations of the Department i.e. Kala Academy, Goa, Institute Menezes Braganza, Panaji-Goa

Welcome to Sahitya Akademisahitya-akademi.gov.in/pdf/aplyonlineapplication.pdf · 2015. 8. 17. · Secretary, Lalit Kala Academy, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi Secretary, Sahitya Academy,

The International Centre Goa - KALA ACADEMY … Halliday.pdfin association with KALA ACADEMY Mao Zedonq: Jung unang Jon Halliday Co-authors - Mao: The Unknown Story Under the Patronage

KALA ACADEMY GOAkalaacademygoa.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Brochure... · 2020. 3. 5. · by the Madras Music Academy (2019), Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (2012), Yuva Kala Bharathi,

Kala 300 Polnisch Hauptanleitung 17 Seiten 24.03.03 · Kala 300 Kala 300 Duo Kala 300Trio Kala 300 Quattro Kala 300Vox Kala 300Vox Duo Kala 300VoxTrio Kala 300Vox Quattro H PL SK

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REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP) FOR SELECTION OF ... - … · Goa Konkani Academy Goa Meat Complex Ltd Goa Medical College and Hospital . Info Tech Corporation of Goa Ltd (A Government

CITIZEN CHARTER GOA COLLEGE OF ART ALTINHO, PANAJI-GOA · The Goa College of Art is recognized as the premier art institution in the state which was founded in the year 1972 by Kala

WORLD PEACE CENTRE (ALANDI), MAEER MIT'S VISHWASHANTI SANGEET KALA ACADEMY · 2019. 5. 17. · Vishwashanti Sangeet Kala Academy(VSKA) Courses Offered 1) Vishwashanti Sangeet Sanskriti

REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP) FOR ... - Government of Goa · Info Tech Corporation of Goa Ltd (A Government of Goa Undertaking) (An ISO 9001 : 2008 Company) ... Goa Konkani Academy Goa

Kala Upasana Music and Dance Academy VID . M.A ...kalaupasana.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Kala... · Recital by Kala Upasana students From 10:00 am to 12:30 pm Kala Upasana Music

Photos - Uttar Gujarat Vijugvcl.com/Chmn Award - Website .pdf · Gallery - NCPA, Mumbai, India Habitat Centre, Delhi and Goa Kala Academy. "Maira's World" series of exhibitions have

 · The Secretary, Goa Konkani Academy, 243, Patto Colony, Panaji-Goa. Gomantak marathi Academy, Marathi Bhawan, Alto Porvorim-Goa. Indian Red Cross Society-Goa, Municipal Complex,

Margao, Goa. - Vidya Vikas Academy, Goavidyavikasacademy.edu.in/web/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/List-of-T… · Vidya Vikas Academy Margao, Goa. SUBJECTS Maths English English Grammar

2nd All India Art Exhibition, 2018 - Kala Uday Society€¦ · from various fraternities. Several other institutions like Bombay Art Society, Lalit Kala academy, Art society of India,

kalaacademygoa.co.inkalaacademygoa.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Audit...KALA ACADEMY GOA Campal-Panaji-Goa SCHEDULES FORMING PART OF BALANCE SHEET AS AT 31st MARCH,2017 SCHEDULE

Preview and Reviews - Mike Hayward · wd the Kala Academy, Goa. ABERDEEN'S EVENING NEWS OCTOBER What a way to celebrate MARK SMTTH saw The Audition at the Arts Cent-er Aberdeen. FROM

kalaacademygoa.co.in...Government of Goa re-furbished Kala Academy complex by installing new Equipments and upgrading existing facilitie The same has been accounted in the books of

Lourdino Barreto 1982 Goenchem Git. Pustok 1. Manddo ani ...this website when we met at the Kala Academy in Panaji, Goa. I take this opportunity to thank him for his contribution to

innopharm3.innovareacademics.ininnopharm3.innovareacademics.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/...scheduled on 22-23 Oct 2018, Kala Academy, Panjim, Goa, India. The conference shall be one

ACBI NEWS BULLETIN - Association of Clinical …acbindia.org/ACBI NEWS - March 2018.pdfand will be held at Kala Academy, Panjim, Goa from 24th to 27th December 2018. All important

Selected Exhibition History - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Kala Academy, Goa, Artists from Goa: An Exhibition of Paintings, December 19–27. Exh. cat. 1991 Pundole Art Gallery,

VISHWASHANTI SANGEET KALA ACADEMY

KALA ACADEMY Mao Zedonq: Jung unang Jon Halliday Co … Halliday.pdf · 2017. 10. 29. · KALA ACADEMY Mao Zedonq: Jung unang Jon Halliday Co-authors - Mao: The Unknown Story Under

Kala 300 Ungarisch Hauptanleitung 17 Seiten 24.03.03 fileKala 300 Kala 300 Duo Kala 300Trio Kala 300 Quattro Kala 300Vox Kala 300Vox Duo Kala 300VoxTrio Kala 300Vox Quattro H PL SK

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Sahitya Akademi Awardsahitya-akademi.gov.in/library/meettheauthor/n_shivdas.pdf · 2017. 8. 10. · Kala Academy's best script writer award Married to Rajani Salkar. Kala Academy

Determinants of Migration to Goa, India: A Gravity Model Analysis

• Research Note
• Published: 09 July 2021
• Volume 64 , pages 485–498, ( 2021 )

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• P. S. Devi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8777-9824 1 &
• P. K. Sudarsan 1  

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In India, the volume of internal migration is increasing rapidly after remaining stagnant at around 30% of the total population up to 2001. However, the volume of inter-state migration is substantially lower than that of intra-state migration. In the case of Goa, compared to other states, the proportion of inter-state migration is relatively higher. The main objective of this paper is to study the variables that influence the movement of migrants from other states to Goa. Through a gravity model framework, determinants such as density of population, distance, per capita NSDP, literacy and their role in migration are examined. Individual motivations for migration are also studied within a push–pull framework. It is observed from the results of the gravity models that while population density positively affects out-migration, distance and per capita NSDP of the source state have a negative effect. While economic factors dominate in both push and pull factors, the growing role of social factors in the choice of destination reflects the growing importance of networks in certain forms of employment.

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Devi, P.S., Sudarsan, P.K. Determinants of Migration to Goa, India: A Gravity Model Analysis. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 64 , 485–498 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-021-00323-z

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Published on 18.6.2024 in Vol 26 (2024)

Monitoring Adverse Drug Events in Web Forums: Evaluation of a Pipeline and Use Case Study

Authors of this article:

Original Paper

• Pierre Karapetiantz 1 , PhD   ; 
• Bissan Audeh 1 , PhD   ; 
• Akram Redjdal 1 , PhD   ; 
• Théophile Tiffet 2, 3 , MD   ; 
• Cédric Bousquet 1, 2 , PhD, PharmD   ; 
• Marie-Christine Jaulent 1 , PhD  

1 Inserm, Sorbonne Université, université Paris 13, Laboratoire d’informatique médicale et d’ingénierie des connaissances en e-santé, LIMICS, F-75006, Paris, France

2 Service de santé publique et information médicale, CHU de Saint Etienne, 42000 Saint-Etienne, France

3 Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Université Jean Monnet, SAnté INgéniérie BIOlogie St-Etienne, SAINBIOSE, 42270 Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France

Corresponding Author:

Marie-Christine Jaulent, PhD

Sorbonne Université

université Paris 13, Laboratoire d’informatique médicale et d’ingénierie des connaissances en e-santé, LIMICS, F-75006

15 rue de l'école de Médecine

Paris, 75006

Phone: 33 144279108

Email: [email protected]

Background: To mitigate safety concerns, regulatory agencies must make informed decisions regarding drug usage and adverse drug events (ADEs). The primary pharmacovigilance data stem from spontaneous reports by health care professionals. However, underreporting poses a notable challenge within the current system. Explorations into alternative sources, including electronic patient records and social media, have been undertaken. Nevertheless, social media’s potential remains largely untapped in real-world scenarios.

Objective: The challenge faced by regulatory agencies in using social media is primarily attributed to the absence of suitable tools to support decision makers. An effective tool should enable access to information via a graphical user interface, presenting data in a user-friendly manner rather than in their raw form. This interface should offer various visualization options, empowering users to choose representations that best convey the data and facilitate informed decision-making. Thus, this study aims to assess the potential of integrating social media into pharmacovigilance and enhancing decision-making with this novel data source. To achieve this, our objective was to develop and assess a pipeline that processes data from the extraction of web forum posts to the generation of indicators and alerts within a visual and interactive environment. The goal was to create a user-friendly tool that enables regulatory authorities to make better-informed decisions effectively.

Methods: To enhance pharmacovigilance efforts, we have devised a pipeline comprising 4 distinct modules, each independently editable, aimed at efficiently analyzing health-related French web forums. These modules were (1) web forums’ posts extraction, (2) web forums’ posts annotation, (3) statistics and signal detection algorithm, and (4) a graphical user interface (GUI). We showcase the efficacy of the GUI through an illustrative case study involving the introduction of the new formula of Levothyrox in France. This event led to a surge in reports to the French regulatory authority.

Results: Between January 1, 2017, and February 28, 2021, a total of 2,081,296 posts were extracted from 23 French web forums. These posts contained 437,192 normalized drug-ADE couples, annotated with the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification and Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA). The analysis of the Levothyrox new formula revealed a notable pattern. In August 2017, there was a sharp increase in posts related to this medication on social media platforms, which coincided with a substantial uptick in reports submitted by patients to the national regulatory authority during the same period.

Conclusions: We demonstrated that conducting quantitative analysis using the GUI is straightforward and requires no coding. The results aligned with prior research and also offered potential insights into drug-related matters. Our hypothesis received partial confirmation because the final users were not involved in the evaluation process. Further studies, concentrating on ergonomics and the impact on professionals within regulatory agencies, are imperative for future research endeavors. We emphasized the versatility of our approach and the seamless interoperability between different modules over the performance of individual modules. Specifically, the annotation module was integrated early in the development process and could undergo substantial enhancement by leveraging contemporary techniques rooted in the Transformers architecture. Our pipeline holds potential applications in health surveillance by regulatory agencies or pharmaceutical companies, aiding in the identification of safety concerns. Moreover, it could be used by research teams for retrospective analysis of events.

Introduction

Social media as a complementary data source for pharmacovigilance.

One primary mission of regulatory agencies such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) or the EMA (European Medicines Agency) is to monitor drug usage and adverse drug events (ADEs) to mitigate the risks associated with drugs within the population. This task entails analyzing diverse data sources, including clinical trials, postmarketing surveillance, spontaneous reporting systems, and published scientific literature. Despite the wealth of available data, some ADEs are not always detected promptly, largely because of underreporting. In France, for instance, underreporting was estimated to range between 78% and 99% from 1997 to 2002 [ 1 ]. To tackle this challenge, several countries have implemented systems allowing patients to report ADEs.

Additional sources for detecting ADEs have been under exploration, such as electronic patient records [ 2 - 4 ] and social media platforms [ 5 - 9 ]. While some argue that social media alone cannot serve as a primary source for signal detection [ 10 ], it can be viewed as a valuable secondary source for monitoring emerging adverse drug reactions or reinforcing signals previously identified through spontaneous reports stored in traditional pharmacovigilance databases [ 11 ]. In a prior study by the authors, patient profiles and reported ADEs found in web forums were compared with those in the French Pharmacovigilance Database (FPVD). The forums tended to represent younger patients, more women, less severe cases, and a higher incidence of psychiatric disorder–related ADEs compared with the FPVD [ 12 ]. Moreover, forums reported a greater number of unexpected ADEs. Over the past decade, several tools for evaluating social media posts have been described in the literature [ 13 ]. Specifically, effective ADE detection in social media necessitates both quantitative and qualitative analyses of data [ 14 ].

Qualitative Approach for Individual Assessment of Posts

Qualitative assessment entails evaluating whether users’ messages contain pertinent information for an assessment akin to a pharmacovigilance case report. This includes details such as the patient’s age and gender, the severity of the case, the expectedness and timeline of the adverse event, time-to-onset, dechallenge (outcome upon drug withdrawal), and rechallenge (outcome upon drug reintroduction). For instance, GlaxoSmithKline Inc. implemented the qualitative approach Insight Explorer, which facilitates the collection of extensive data for causality and quality assessment. Users can input data including personal information (eg, age range, gender) and product details (eg, name, route of administration, duration of use, dosage). This approach was adapted for the WEB-RADR (Recognizing Adverse Drug Reactions) project to manually construct a gold standard of curated patient-authored text [ 15 ].

Quantitative Approach for Monitoring Adverse Drug Events on Social Media

Quantitative evaluation involves analyzing extracted data using descriptive and analytical statistics, such as signal detection and change-point analysis. Numerous projects have been undertaken to monitor ADEs on social media. One of the earliest projects is the PREDOSE (Prescription Drug Abuse Online Surveillance and Epidemiology) project [ 5 ], which investigates the illicit use of pharmaceutical opioids reported in web forums. While the PREDOSE project showcased the potential of leveraging social media for opioid monitoring, notable limitations are the lack of deidentification and signal detection methods. MedWatcher Social, a monitoring platform for health-related web forums, Twitter, and Facebook, represents a prototype application developed in 2014 [ 16 ]. Yeleswarapu et al [ 6 ] outlined a semiautomatic pipeline that applies natural language processing (NLP) tasks to extract ADEs from MEDLINE abstracts and user comments from health-related websites. However, this pipeline was not intended for routine use.

The Domino’s interface [ 17 ], developed in 2018 by the University of Bordeaux in France and funded by the French Medicines Agency (Agence nationale de sécurité du médicament et des produits de santé [ANSM]), was designed to analyze drug misuses in health-related web forums using NLP methods and the summary of product characteristics. Initially tailored for antidepressant drugs, this tool does not primarily focus on ADE surveillance.

Another pipeline, described by Nikfarjam et al in 2019 [ 7 ], used a neural network–based named entity recognition system specifically designed for user-generated content in social media. This platform is dedicated to identifying the association of cutaneous ADEs with cancer therapy drugs. The study focused on a selection of drugs and only examined 8 ADEs.

Magge et al [ 8 ] described a pipeline aimed at the extraction and normalization of adverse drug mentions on Twitter. Their pipeline consisted of an ADE classifier designed to identify tweets mentioning an ADE, which were then mapped to a MedDRA (Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology) code. However, the normalization process was confined to the ADEs present in the training set. Neither Nikfarjam’s nor Magge’s pipeline provides a graphical user interface.

Some private companies also offer tools for analyzing social media for pharmacovigilance purposes. For instance, the DETECT platform was developed as part of a collaborative project in France by Kappa Santé [ 18 ]. This system enabled the labeling of posts with known controlled vocabulary concepts, and signal detection was conducted [ 19 ]. Within the scope of this project, Expert System Company implemented BIOPHARMA Navigator to extract web forum posts, while the Luxid Annotation Server provided web services for the automatic annotation of posts.

An important finding from the studies of the last decade is that while regulatory agencies have begun using data sources beyond spontaneous reports, social media has yet to be fully leveraged in real-world settings due to the immaturity of available solutions. Primarily, these solutions are essentially proofs of concept that lack scalability and are challenging for experts to evaluate routinely, primarily due to the absence of a graphical user interface to present information.

Our aim was to assess the potential of integrating social media into pharmacovigilance and enhancing decision-making with this novel data source. To achieve this, our objective was to develop and assess a pipeline that processes data from the extraction of web forum posts to the generation of indicators and alerts within a visual and interactive environment. The goal was to create a user-friendly tool that enables regulatory authorities to make better-informed decisions effectively.

This article presents the design and implementation of our pipeline dedicated to harnessing posts from social media. In addition, we showcase the use of the pipeline through a specific use case, emphasizing the importance of monitoring drugs in social media to better address patients’ expectations.

The PHARES project (Pharmacovigilance in Social Networks), funded from 2017 to 2019 by the French ANSM, aimed to develop a software suite (a pipeline) enabling pharmacovigilance users to analyze social networks, particularly messages posted on forums. The objective of the pipeline is to facilitate routine use through continuous post extraction and quantitative data analysis from web forums, specifically tailored for the French language.

The pipeline is made up of 4 modules, each referring to its own methods ( Figure 1 ):

The Scraper module, which extracts posts from forums using a previously developed tool, Vigi4Med (V4M) scraper [ 9 ], and produces a comma-separated values (CSV) file filled with the texts extracted.

The Annotation module, which extracts elements of interest from the posts and registers annotations in CSV files, with each line representing an annotation of an ADE or a drug. When a causality relationship is identified, both an ADE and a drug are annotated on the same line.

The Statistical module, which performs quantitative analysis on the annotated posts, generating numerical data, tables, or figures.

The Interface module, which supports query definition and visualization of results.

The methodology used to evaluate the PHARES pipeline involved comparing its performance with existing platforms mentioned above, in accordance with a set of criteria established with prospective PHARES users. The criteria, specific to each module, are as follows:

• General level: focus on ADEs, designed for routine usage.
• Scraper: collects all posts of a selected website, performs deidentification, allows to extract posts from web forums, and is open source.
• Statistics: the temporal evolution of posts or annotations is displayed and a change-point analysis (detecting breakpoints) is possible.
• Signal detection: allows to apply at least one signal detection method, displays the temporal evolution of the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), and allows to perform a logistic regression–based signal detection method.
• Graphical user interface: has an interface for users.

Scraper Module

V4M Scraper is an open-source tool designed for data extraction from web forums [ 9 ]. Its primary functions are optimizing scraping time, filtering out posts primarily focused on advertisements, and structuring the extracted data semantically. The module operates by taking a configuration file as input, which contains the URL of the targeted forum. The algorithm navigates through forum pages and generates resource description framework (RDF) triplets for each extracted element, allowing for potential alignment with external semantic resources. A caching mechanism has been integrated into this tool to maintain a local copy of previously visited pages, thereby avoiding redundant requests to websites for already scraped web pages, particularly in cases of errors or testing, for example. Vigi4Med V4M Scraper was customized for the PHARES project, as indicated by the red elements in Figure S1 in Multimedia Appendix 1 . The database format (Figure S2 in Multimedia Appendix 1 ) was implemented to enhance interaction with the interface. Specifically, the main scraping script was adjusted to produce a simplified tabular format (CSV) of the extracted data and to store these data in a database. This modification aims to facilitate input to the subsequent module of the pipeline (annotation). V4M Scraper was customized to enable a continuous scraping routine, wherein data extracted from web forums are automatically and regularly annotated and registered. A log file was integrated into the scraper structure to maintain a record of the last scraped element. This log file ensures that the daily routine scraping always begins from the last scraped point. An automation tool (crontab) is used to schedule the execution of the pipeline for each forum on a daily basis at a specific time.

A total of 23 public French health-related web forums were selected through a combination of Google searches and from a list of certified health websites provided by the HON Foundation, in collaboration with the French National Health Authority (HAS). The selection criteria included the requirement for websites to be hosted in France, feature a discussion board or space for sharing experiences, and have more than 10 patient contributions. Furthermore, Twitter posts are collected and analyzed by the pipeline. This is achieved using the Twitter API for data collection, followed by employing the same modules used for processing web forum posts.

Annotation Module

Entities corresponding to drugs and pathological conditions in social media were identified and annotated using an NLP pipeline [ 20 ]. Initially, conditional random fields were used to account for global dependencies [ 21 ]. Specifically, the model considers the entire sequence when making predictions for individual tokens. This approach is advantageous for entity extraction tasks, as the presence of an entity in one part of the text can influence the likelihood of other entities in the vicinity. Second, a support vector machine is used to predict the causality relationship between an entity identified as a drug and another entity identified as an ADE. The annotation method used in this module was implemented at an early stage of the pipeline’s design. Currently, the named entity recognition task of this module is undergoing revision to incorporate more recent advancements in NLP algorithms [ 22 - 26 ].

In a third step, the detected annotations were normalized using codes from the MedDRA and the Anatomical Therapeutic Classification (ATC) to ensure they were suitable for signal detection purposes.

MedDRA is an international medical hierarchical terminology comprising 5 levels used to code potential ADEs in pharmacovigilance. The highest level is the system organ class, which is further divided into high-level group terms, then into high-level terms, preferred terms (PTs), and finally lowest level terms. Typically, the PT level is used in pharmacovigilance signal detection.

The ATC classification system is a drug classification used in France for pharmacovigilance purposes. It categorizes the active ingredients of drugs based on the organ system they primarily affect. The classification comprises 5 levels: the anatomical main group (consisting of 14 main groups), the therapeutic subgroup, the therapeutic/pharmacological subgroup, the chemical/therapeutic/pharmacological subgroup, and the chemical substance. Typically, the fifth level (chemical substance) is used in pharmacovigilance signal detection.

The outputs of the annotation module are CSV files with the following variables:

• Concerning the post: forum name, post ID, and date
• Concerning the ADE: verbatim, normalized term, unified medical language system’s concept unique identifier, and MedDRA code
• Concerning the drug: verbatim, normalized term, active ingredient, and ATC code

In these CSV files, each line can consist of either an adverse event (ADE) annotation, a drug annotation, or both when a causality relationship has been identified between the drug and the ADE. Table 1 provides a sample of the database.

In a prior study, we selected posts where at least one ADE associated with 6 drugs (agomelatine, baclofen, duloxetine, exenatide, strontium ranelate, and tetrazepam) had been detected by this algorithm. A manual review revealed that among 5149 posts, 1284 (24.94%) were validated as pharmacovigilance cases [ 12 ]. The fundamental metrics used to assess the performance of the annotation module were precision (P), recall (R), and their harmonic mean F 1 -score. To calculate these metrics, it is necessary to evaluate false negatives for nonrecognition of relevant terms, false positives for irrelevant recognitions, and true positives for correct recognitions. Precision, recall, and F 1 -score are defined as follows:

Precision = (true positive)/(true positive + false positive); recall = (true positive)/(true positive + false negative); F 1 -score = (2 × precision × recall)/(precision + recall) (1)

In the “Results” section, we present a comparison of the performance of the annotation module with the performance of state-of-the-art methods [ 8 , 22 , 25 , 26 ].

a ADE: adverse event.

b MedDRA: Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology.

c ATC: Anatomical Therapeutic Classification.

d No data are available for this slot.

Statistical Module

This module generates general statistics and diagrams for web forums or Twitter. It provides data such as the number of annotated posts (related to the drug, the ADE, or both), the count of drug-ADE pairs identified, and the distribution of ADEs’ MedDRA-PTs. In addition, a change-point analysis method was used to detect significant changes over time in the mean number of posts mentioning the drug and ADE [ 27 ].

Besides, several statistical signal detection methods were implemented to generate potential signals. Safety signals, which provide information on adverse events that may potentially be caused by a medicine, were further evaluated by pharmacovigilance experts to determine the causal relationship between the medicine and the reported adverse event.

The statistical module implements 3 signal detection methods, including 2 well-known and frequently used disproportionality signal detection methods: the PRR [ 28 ] and the reporting odds ratio (ROR) [ 29 ]. In addition, a complementary method, a logistic regression–based signal detection method known as the class imbalanced subsampling lasso [ 30 ], was used.

PRR and ROR are akin to a relative risk and an odds ratio, respectively. However, they differ in their denominators: as the number of exposed patients is typically unknown in pharmacovigilance databases, the denominator in PRR and ROR calculations is the number of cases reported in the pharmacovigilance database.

PRR and ROR are specific to each drug-ADE pair and can be directly computed from the contingency table ( Table 2 ).

The PRR compares the proportion of an ADE among all the ADEs reported for a specific drug with the same proportion for all other drugs in the database (Equation 2). A PRR significantly greater than 1 suggests that the ADE is more frequently reported for patients taking the drug of interest, while a PRR equal to 1 suggests independence between the 2 variables.

PRR = [a/(a + b)]/[c/(c + d)] (2)

The ROR quantifies the strength of the association between drug administration and the occurrence of the ADE. It represents the ratio of the odds of drug administration when the ADE is present to the odds of drug administration when the ADE is absent (Equation 3). When the 2 events are independent, the ROR equals 1. An ROR significantly greater than 1 suggests that drug administration is associated with the presence of the ADE.

ROR = ad / bc (3)

We considered events over posts for the calculation of disproportionality statistics. If the same drug-ADE pair was identified multiple times within a post, the pair was counted as many times as it occurred in the calculation.

Disproportionality analysis has certain limitations, including the confounding effect resulting from coreported drugs and the masking effect, where the background relative reporting rate of an ADE is distorted by extensive reporting on the ADE with a specific drug or drug group. Caster et al [ 31 ] demonstrated through 2 real case examples how multivariate regression–based approaches can address these issues. Harpaz et al also suggested that logistic regression could be used for safety surveillance [ 32 ]. Initially designed for pharmacovigilance case reports, we hypothesize that they may also be applicable to posts.

The logistic regression model specifically focuses on a particular ADE or a group of ADEs. It involves creating a vector that represents the presence (1) or absence (0) of the ADE of interest in the pharmacovigilance case (in our case, in the post). Additionally, a matrix is generated to represent the administration or nonadministration of all drugs in the database by the patient (1 for administration and 0 for nonadministration). Figure S3 in Multimedia Appendix 1 illustrates an example of using logistic regression. In our case, we assumed that if a drug was annotated in the post, it was taken by the patient. The logistic regression aims to predict the probability of the presence of the ADE (ADE=1) of interest based on the presence of all ( N m ) drugs in the database (Equation 4), where X represents the distribution of the presence/absence of the drugs. The adjusted factors included only concomitant medications, as patient-related factors are often missing in web forums’ posts. Therefore, we did not need to address the impact of missing data, which should be evaluated when necessary.

ln([P(X|ADE=1)]/[P(X|ADE=0)]) = a + b1 × Drug1 + ... + bi × Drug i + .. . + bNm × Drug Nm (4)

The selection of the drugs depends on the parameter b i . If b i <0, the drug i decreases the risk of the ADE, and if b i >0, the drug i increases the risk of the ADE.

Then, 2 sets are defined:

• S 1 : set of n 1 posts with an annotation of the ADEs of interest.
• S 0 : set of n 0 posts without an annotation of the ADEs of interest.

In our case n 0 >> n 1 , indicating a significant imbalance toward posts lacking annotations of the ADEs of interest. To address this issue, we took a subsample with a more favorable ratio of posts with annotated ADEs versus those without. Additionally, to enhance result stability, we conducted multiple draws instead of just one.

In practice, we generated B subsamples. Each subsample was constructed by randomly drawing, with replacement, n 1 posts from S 1 and R posts from S 0 , where R=max(4 n 1 , 4 N m ). The choice of 4 n 1 was inspired by case-control studies, while 4 N m was included to ensure an adequate number of observations considering the multitude of predictors.

We implemented a change-point analysis method described in [ 27 ] to detect whether there was a change in the evolution over time of a chosen statistic, such as the number of a specific drug-ADE pair, the number of ADEs associated with a specific drug, or the number of drugs associated with a specific ADE. The method uses the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) algorithm to analyze the evolution of statistics over time, comparing current values with the period mean. It identifies breakpoints by calculating the highest difference in statistical values and comparing it with random samples. The process repeats for periods before and after detected breakpoints until no more are found.

User Interface Module

The user interface module facilitates user interaction with the pipeline in a user-friendly manner. The interface comprises a dashboard divided into 2 main parts. The left dark column ( Figure 2 ) serves as a control sidebar, where users can select parameters to filter the data, including the forum, period, drug(s) according to the ATC classification, and ADE(s) according to a level in the MedDRA hierarchy. On the right side of the interface, various visualizations are available, organized into several tabs such as “Forum Statistics” and “Consultation of Posts,” with additional tabs for statistics that become active upon querying.

Before applying a specific query, the interface provides general information about the currently available data ( Figure 2 ), including the total annotated posts since 2017 (n=2,081,296) and total annotations since 2017 (n=2,454,310). In addition, a “Consultation of Tweets” tab (not visible in the figure) displays the total annotated tweets since March 2020 (n=46,153).

Furthermore, several tabs corresponding to different types of statistics, including “Forums Statistics” and “Twitter Statistics,” provide general statistics and diagrams for web forums and Twitter. Examples of these are pie charts showing forum distribution, line charts depicting the evolution of drug and ADE mentions, histograms displaying ADE distribution by system organ class, and line charts illustrating the temporal trend of posts containing the drug and an ADE, as shown in Figures 3 and 4 . The “Annotations Plot” tab displays annotations of drugs and adverse effects selected by the user, along with forum information, PTs, high-level terms, high-level group terms, dates, and hours. The “Logistic Regression” tab allows users to choose parameters for applying logistic regression. In the “Disproportionality” tab, users can choose between the PRR and ROR methods, with the time evolution of the chosen method displayed. The “Change-Point” tab enables analysis of temporal evolution, with identified breakpoints indicated. The “Consultation of Posts” and “Consultation of Tweets” tabs provide details on annotated posts/tweets, including downloadable tables. The statistical module performs calculations based on user queries, updating the interface accordingly. If multiple drugs or adverse events are selected, they are treated as new entities for analysis.

The interface was implemented using the R language and environment (R Foundation) for statistical computing and graphics [ 33 ], leveraging the Shiny package [ 34 ] for development.

Ethical Considerations

A statement by an Institutional Review Board was not required because we used only publicly available data that do not necessitate Institutional Review Board review.

This study complied with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has been in force since 2018 in Europe [ 35 ]. The GDPR enhances the protection of individuals by introducing the right to be informed about the processing of personal data. However, informing each user individually may be impractical. Therefore, the GDPR introduces 2 legal conditions where informed consent is not mandatory, which can be interpreted as supporting the processing of web forum posts for pharmacovigilance (Article 9): “(e) processing relates to personal data which are manifestly made public by the data subject; [. . .] (i) processing is necessary for reasons of public interest in the area of public health, such as [. . .] ensuring high standards of quality and safety of health care and of medicinal products . . ..” The GDPR also requires data processing to “not permit or no longer permits the identification of data subjects” (Article 89). Deidentification was conducted during the extraction of posts from web forums to ensure privacy [ 9 ]. User identifiers in the main RDF file were encrypted using the SHA1 algorithm [ 36 ]. The correspondence between these encrypted identifiers and the original keys is presented in RDF triplets in a separate file, referred to as the “keys file.” Therefore, the only way to retrieve the original authors’ identities is by concatenating the main RDF containing the encrypted data with the keys file, which is kept in a secured location. Moreover, all our data processing was carried out on a secured server with restricted access.

General Results About the Pipeline

The primary outcome of this study is the operational PHARES pipeline itself. Daily extraction and annotation of posts are initiated and imported into the database linked to the user interface. In this paper, the platform’s use will be demonstrated through a specific use case on the analysis of Levothyrox ADE mentions in forums (discussed later). In addition, we conducted a comparative analysis of the PHARES pipeline with the existing platforms mentioned in the “Introduction” section, based on the criteria listed in the “Methods” section.

Of the 10 identified pipelines, half were public and half were private. While 8 out of 10 focused on ADEs, only 4 were designed for routine usage. Five scrapers were open source, and all posts from considered websites were extracted by only 6 of the scrapers (with others extracting posts under certain conditions). Six scraped web forum posts, but only 3 performed deidentification. Additionally, 4 pipelines focused on the French language. A total of 6 pipelines displayed the temporal evolution of the number of posts, but only 1 conducted a change-point analysis. Signal detection methods were performed by only 4 of them, with none displaying the temporal evolution of the PRR nor a logistic regression–based method. Finally, 6 of them had an interface ( Table 3 ).

a PHARES: Pharmacovigilance in Social Networks.

b The X symbol means that the characteristic is missing and the symbol ✓ means the characteristic is fulfilled.

c ADE: adverse drug event.

d PRR: proportional reporting ratio.

e PREDOSE: Prescription Drug Abuse Online Surveillance and Epidemiology.

f ADR-PRISM: Adverse Drug Reaction from Patient Reports in Social Media.

Annotation Module’s Comparison With Up-to-Date State-of-the-Art Methods

We also compared the performance of our annotation process with those of up-to-date state-of-the-art methods ( Table 4 ).

While the annotation module demonstrated good performance for named entity recognition ( F 1 -score=0.886), it remains slightly below the state of the art. Presently, in medical texts, the best performances are achieved by Hussain et al [ 25 ] and Ding et al [ 26 ] for the named entity recognition task, and by Xia [ 22 ] for the relationship extraction task. On Twitter, known for its notably more complex data, Hussain et al [ 25 ] achieved slightly better results than our annotator, while Ding et al [ 26 ] achieved slightly worse results.

a The 2 categories are entity recognition, which is the detection of a drug or ADE mention, and relationship extraction, which is the detection of a relation between a drug and an ADE.

b PHARES: Pharmacovigilance in Social Networks.

c BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer.

d Not available.

e HAMLE: Historical Awareness Multi-Level Embedding.

f BGRU: Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit.

g LSTM: Long-Short-Term-Memory.

Summary of the Result

From January 1, 2017, to February 28, 2021, a total of 2,081,296 posts were extracted from 23 French web forums ( Table 5 ). We obtained 713,057 normalized annotations of drugs, 1,527,004 normalized annotations of ADEs, and 437,192 annotations of normalized drug-ADE couples. The number of posts annotated with at least one normalized drug-ADE couple was equal to 125,279 (6.02%). Table 4 summarizes the number of posts extracted per forum, the publication dates, and the description of the web forum. For 1 forum, the publication dates were not available. A total of 9 were generalist health forums, 3 were specialized for parents of a young baby, 2 for families, 3 for mothers, 2 specialized in thyroid issues, 1 for pregnant women, 1 for women, 1 for parents of a teenager or for teenagers, 1 for sports persons, and 1 specialized in rare diseases.

a Not available.

Use Case: Analysis of Levothyrox ADE Mentions in Forums

To demonstrate the usage of the pipeline, we chose to focus on Levothyrox as a case study. Levothyrox is a drug prescribed in France since 1980 for hypothyroidism and circumstances where it is necessary to limit the thyroid-stimulating hormone. In 2017, a new formula of Levothyrox, differing from the 30-year-old drug at the excipient level (with lactose being replaced by mannitol and citric acid in the new formula), was marketed with widespread media coverage. In parallel, an unexpected increase in notifications of ADEs for this drug was detected. Viard et al [ 37 ] were unable to find any pharmacological rationale to explain that signal. Approximately 32,000 adverse effects were reported by patients in France in 2017, representing 42% of all the ADEs collected yearly [ 38 ]. Most of these notifications concerned the new formulation of Levothyrox and led to the “French Levothyrox crisis.” In 2017, 1664 notifications of ADEs were spontaneously reported by patients to the Pharmacovigilance Center of Nice. Among the 1544 reviewed notifications, 1372 concerned Levothyrox while only 172 concerned other drugs [ 37 ].

In this use case, the study period was from January 1, 2017, to February 28, 2021, and the drugs included were 2 drugs from the “H03AA Thyroid hormones” ATC class: “Levothyroxine sodium” and “associations of levothyroxine and liothyronine.” A total of 17 forums were selected as they included at least one post with information about these drugs. Posts were extracted, annotated, and analyzed through the pipeline from several forums ( Table 6 ). Signal detection methods were applied to an ADE chosen as it frequently appeared with Levothyrox in our data: “tiredness.” A signal can be detected when the lower bound of the 95% CI of the logarithm of the PRR is greater than 0. For logistic regression, we applied the tenth quantile. A total of 11,340 posts contained an annotation concerning the drugs of interest. Figure S4 in Multimedia Appendix 1 illustrates the source and evolution over time of these posts. Out of a total of 50,127 annotations of Levothyrox, they principally originated from the Vivre sans thyroïde forum and were mostly posted in mid-2017 ( Figure 4 , Table 6 ). The results of the statistical analysis were displayed by the user interface.

ADEs annotated with Levothyrox were mainly from system organ classes: general disorders and administration site conditions (29.6%), metabolism and nutrition disorders (11.6%), and endocrine disorders (11.4%). The PTs mostly found in association with Levothyrox are listed in Table 7 . All this information is accessible in the interface module (Figure S5 in Multimedia Appendix 1 ).

We chose the PT “tiredness” for the signal detection analysis. A total of 85,976 posts were annotated with either one of the drugs of interest or the ADE tiredness. Among them, 1841 Levothyrox-tiredness couples were found, mostly in 2017 ( Table 7 ).

Figure 5 illustrates the time evolution of the PRR for the Levothyrox-tiredness couple. Figure S6 in Multimedia Appendix 1 displays the source and evolution over time of French web forums’ posts for this couple. A signal is consistently generated throughout the period as the logarithm of the PRR is always greater than 0.

A total of 11 drugs were found to be associated with tiredness using logistic regression: paclitaxel, pegfilgrastim, Levothyrox, glatiramer acetate, escitalopram ferrous sulfate, the combination of Levothyrox and liothyronine, secukinumab, methotrexate, bismuth potassium, tetracycline, and metronidazole.

Change-point analysis was conducted on the monthly evolution of the number of Levothyrox-ADE couples detected in web forums. Six breakpoints were identified ( Figure 6 ), and 3 of them correlated with an increase in the number of ADEs found with Levothyrox on web forums. These increases occurred in August 2017 and in September and December 2018.

This use case demonstrates that the results obtained through the pipeline, particularly in the context of Levothyrox, align with findings in the literature derived from more traditional data sources such as case reports in pharmacovigilance (see the “Discussion” section). It underscores the potential of leveraging such a pipeline to monitor a drug, not only retrospectively but also in real time using social media. Consequently, PHARES has the capability to potentially uncover new signals in pharmacovigilance.

Principal Findings

To align with our objective, we implemented and evaluated a pipeline that processes data from the extraction of web forum posts to the generation of indicators and alerts within a visual and interactive environment. Through this pipeline, we demonstrated that quantitative analysis can be conducted through the interface without requiring the user to code. We discovered the feasibility of acquiring information akin to the literature regarding a drug’s ADEs, as well as unexpected ADEs and significant event dates related to a drug. This underscores the relevance and utility of such a pipeline.

A conceptual contribution of this research was the proposal of a methodology for designing a pipeline to facilitate pharmacovigilance studies on web forums. This involved describing 4 independent modules and outlining their interactions. Additionally, another contribution was the adaptation of certain pharmacovigilance analysis methods for the examination of data extracted from web forum posts. The logistic regression–based method presented in this article was originally tailored for pharmacovigilance cases to consider co-prescriptions of drugs. We have adapted it to suit the analysis of pharmacovigilance data extracted from web forum posts.

Comparison With Prior Work

The PHARES pipeline offers added value compared with previous pipelines in terms of the criteria set, which reflects an analysis of experts’ needs for routine monitoring of ADEs in social media. Unlike previous approaches, the scrapers used in PHARES routinely perform deidentification, and the inclusion of change-point analysis, the evolution of PRRs over time, and a logistic regression–based signal detection method were previously unavailable. The temporal evolution of the number of posts and a signal detection method are also seldom supported. Designed for routine usage and focused on ADEs, all posts from selected web forums are scraped and deidentified using an open-source scraper.

The period and selected web forums differed between both studies: Audeh et al [ 38 ] covered the period from January 2015 to December 2017, while our study spanned from January 2017 to February 2021. Additionally, Audeh et al [ 38 ] included only 1 web forum specialized in thyroid issues, whereas we incorporated this specific forum along with 16 others. The main ADEs associated with Levothyrox in our study align with those found by Audeh et al [ 38 ] on similar data, albeit without using the interface. In our study, the 10 most frequent symptoms were pain, tiredness, faintness, hypothyroidism, dizziness, insomnia, palpitations, hyperthyroidism, malignant tumor, and anxiety. By contrast, Audeh et al [ 38 ] reported tiredness, weight gain, pain, ganglions, hot flush, chilly, inflammation, faintness, weight loss, and discomfort.

Furthermore, the PHARES pipeline surpasses previous efforts, particularly regarding several criteria. These include the annotation tool, where only 4 pipelines were identified using a French annotator tool. In terms of available statistics, only 1 pipeline met both criteria we identified. Regarding signal detection, among the 3 criteria identified, 5 pipelines matched with only 1, while the remaining 5 matched with none.

In the use case, a notable increase in the number of ADEs associated with Levothyrox was detected using the change-point analysis method a few months after the introduction of the new formula in March 2017, specifically in August 2017. This surge coincided with the initial declaration to the pharmacovigilance network and a petition initiated by patients to reintroduce the former formula in June 2017. We compared these findings with results from a pharmacovigilance study based on spontaneous reporting. Out of 1554 notifications spontaneously addressed by patients to the Pharmacovigilance Center of Nice from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2017, 1372 were related to the new formula of Levothyrox, representing 7342 ADEs. Our comparison with these data clarified our findings. The 10 most frequently reported ADEs in these notifications closely resembled our own results [ 37 ]. These were asthenia, headache, dizziness, hair loss, insomnia, cramps, weight gain, nausea, muscle pain, and irritability. Consequently, our results demonstrate coherence with the existing literature. This study illustrates the feasibility of identifying the date of significant events related to a drug. However, it is noteworthy that the detection of such events is not necessarily expedited through social media compared with the traditional pharmacovigilance system.

Limitations

The method used in our annotation process was integrated at an early stage during the pipeline’s design. Regarding the identification of drugs and symptoms, our annotation process exhibited the following performances: precision=0.926, recall=0.845, and F 1 -score=0.886 [ 20 ]. Similarly, for discerning the relationship between the drug and the ADEs, the performances were precision=0.683, recall=0.956, and F 1 -score=0.797 [ 20 ]. This study marked the inaugural publication on using NLP methods to identify ADEs in French-language web forums. The annotation process was thus developed using contemporary state-of-the-art methodologies at the time. However, it would now stand to gain from the integration of more recent NLP algorithms for named entity recognition [ 8 , 23 , 24 ]. These newer algorithms offer comparable performances while effectively handling more complex data, thereby enhancing the efficacy of NLP analysis. However, because of our emphasis on the genericity of the approach and the interoperability between the different modules rather than solely focusing on the performance of each module, we opted not to use these algorithms. Nevertheless, contemporary state-of-the-art methods for annotating ADEs from social media posts encompass convolutional neural networks trained on top of pretrained word vectors for sentence-level classification [ 24 ] and transformers using the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) language model [ 39 ]. Hussain et al [ 25 ] introduced a multitask neural network based on BERT with hyperparameter optimization capable of sentence classification and named entity recognition. This model achieved performances of precision=0.840, recall=0.861, and F 1 -score=0.896 on the Twitter (X)-TwiMed data set. Additionally, Magge et al [ 8 ] presented a pipeline consisting of 3 BERT neural networks designed to classify sentences, extract named entities, and normalize those entities to their respective MedDRA concepts. The performances of this model were as follows: precision=0.82, recall=0.76, and F 1 -score=0.78 on the SMM4H-2020 data set (Twitter/X). Thanks to our modular design, it will be straightforward to substitute our current annotation process with an enhanced model in the future.

Several limitations should be acknowledged for future work. First, the scraper relies on the HTML structure of web forums, necessitating updates to its configuration files if a forum alters its page design. Additionally, our interface lacks the capability to incorporate alternate identifiers for drugs or ADEs. For instance, patients may commonly refer to the drug “baclofen” as “baclo” on social media platforms. Consequently, the number of posts pertaining to a drug or ADE could potentially be underestimated.

Forums must be selected before query execution to mitigate calculation time. However, selecting forums based on the presence of information related to a particular drug or ADE can introduce bias into signal detection methods, particularly in disproportionality analysis, where the drug-ADE pair may be overrepresented. Another limitation in qualitative analysis of posts is the inability of users to edit annotations or record typical pharmacovigilance qualitative data.

The assumption that all drugs mentioned in a post were consumed simultaneously by the user, as applied in the logistic regression–based method, introduces an evident bias.

One limitation associated with the use of social media data pertains to fraudulent posts. The pseudonymity inherent in these platforms provides malevolent individuals with the opportunity to disseminate false rumors. Additionally, patients might post identical or similar messages across multiple discussion boards, or even multiple times on the same board. Thus, it is crucial to consider these factors to mitigate biases in signal detection.

Perspectives

In the short to medium term, our objectives are updating the annotation module to enhance accuracy, improving the qualitative analysis by enabling users to edit and correct annotations, and expanding the range of signal detection methods available in the statistics module.

This method could indeed be beneficial for identifying potential drug misuse and unknown ADEs [ 40 ]. By categorizing pathological terms found in web forums based on their presence in the summary of product characteristics, we can distinguish between indications, known ADEs, and potential instances of drug misuse or unexpected ADEs. However, it is important to note that considering all pathological terms found in the summary of product characteristics as indications might obscure cases of drug inefficiency. Therefore, a nuanced approach is necessary to ensure comprehensive and accurate analysis.

We next tested our pipeline from the perspective of end users. However, the hypothesis was only partially confirmed, indicating the need for further studies. These studies should include evaluations with ergonomic criteria.

In the long term, our vision is to expand this tool to encompass other languages and themes beyond pharmacovigilance. This includes areas such as drug misuse, the consumption of food supplements, and the use of illegal drugs. French web forums dedicated to recreational drug use already exist, providing a valuable source of data for such endeavors.

Conclusions

Our hypothesis focused on the challenge encountered by regulatory agencies in using social media, primarily because of the lack of appropriate decision-making tools. To tackle this challenge, we devised a pipeline consisting of 4 editable modules aimed at effectively analyzing health-related French web forums for pharmacovigilance purposes. Using this pipeline and its user-friendly interface, we successfully demonstrated the feasibility of conducting quantitative analyses without the need for coding. This approach yielded coherent results and holds the potential to reveal new insights about drugs.

A practical implication of our pipeline is its potential application in health surveillance by regulatory agencies such as the ANSM or pharmaceutical companies. It can be instrumental in detecting issues related to drug safety and efficacy in real time. Furthermore, research teams can leverage this tool to retrospectively analyze events and gain valuable insights into pharmacovigilance trends.

Acknowledgments

The annotation module was developed by François Morlane-Hondère, Cyril Grouin, Pierre Zweigenbaum, and Leonardo Campillos-Llanos from the Computer Science Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI). Code review for the graphical user interface in R language was performed by Stevenn Volant under a contract with the Stat4Decision company. Stat4Decision was not involved in designing the study and writing this article. This work was funded by the Agence nationale de sécurité du médicament et des produits de santé (ANSM) through Convention No. 2016S076 and was supported by a PhD contract with Sorbonne Université.

Data Availability

Our data were extracted from web forums that do not allow data sharing. Thus, as we are not the owners of the data we cannot make the data available. The scrapper we developed to extract these data is open source and can be used to extract data from web forum posts. The tool as well as full documentation (in English and French) of the code and configuration file are available online [ 41 ].

Conflicts of Interest

None declared.

Vigi4Med Scraper structure, PHARES database structure, example of data representation, and source and evolution over time of web forum posts. PHARES: Pharmacovigilance in Social Networks.

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Abbreviations

Edited by A Mavragani; submitted 01.02.23; peer-reviewed by S Matsuda, L Shang; comments to author 06.07.23; revised version received 20.10.23; accepted 12.03.24; published 18.06.24.

©Pierre Karapetiantz, Bissan Audeh, Akram Redjdal, Théophile Tiffet, Cédric Bousquet, Marie-Christine Jaulent. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 18.06.2024.

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