Préservation et distorsion : l’espace-temps des réseaux socio-numériques et du web archivé

in Revue d'Histoire Culturelle (2022), (5),

Massive data, also known as Big Data - originating from websites and digital social networks, in the form of text, images, videos or metadata -, constitute significant sources for recent and future ... [more ▼]

Massive data, also known as Big Data - originating from websites and digital social networks, in the form of text, images, videos or metadata -, constitute significant sources for recent and future research in cultural history. These “digital traces”, collected by researchers or institutions, require further methodological thoughts - from their archiving to their development, in order to analyse them at different scales (scalable reading). Indeed, they allow researchers to identify new spatiotemporal boundaries, but also asymmetries and distortions between the theoretical scope of Big Data (from the millisecond to the long term, from the meter to the globe) and its practical scope (regional inequalities in collection, noise and silences within the archives). Based on several research projects and institutional initiatives, this article aims at thinking about the space-time of born-digital heritage, from the standpoint of data, collections and research, in order to grasp both the consequences of this massive archiving on the shaping of history and the profession of historian, and to identify the ongoing issues of these historical sources for academic research. [less ▲]