Stocker par, dans et pour les médias

Presentation (2023, March 20)

Avant de constituer une ‘archive’ ou ‘collection’ se déroule une pratique en apparence banale : celle du stockage. C'est à la fois une pratique triviale et technique, qui relève d’usages individuels ... [more ▼]

Avant de constituer une ‘archive’ ou ‘collection’ se déroule une pratique en apparence banale : celle du stockage. C'est à la fois une pratique triviale et technique, qui relève d’usages individuels (stockage de musique, de photos personnelles, de données…) mais aussi collectifs (stockage par les médias eux-mêmes, les institutions patrimoniales…). Katharina Niemeyer et Valérie Schafer reviendront sur le numéro spécial qu’elles ont récemment coordonné et qui analyse la question du stockage dans une perspective historique, médiatique et matérielle. La problématique de la rencontre entre l’analogique et le numérique est ici au cœur de la réflexion : quelles répercussions de ce contexte renouvelé du stockage pour les usagers, pour les industries médiatiques, pour les institutions patrimoniales ou encore pour l’écriture de cette histoire ? Quels défis se présentent aux archivistes ? Comment se négocie le passage entre analogique et numérique, entre continuités et ruptures ? En présentant des exemples (CD-Rom, stockage pair-à-pair, etc.) qui couvrent le stockage par, dans et pour les médias, la rencontre souhaite également engager un échange sur une pratique transversale aux médias et usages médiatiques et sur un sujet inépuisable. [less ▲]

Internet histories second early career researcher award

in Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (2023), 6(4),

This special issue is the result of our second call for the Internet Histories Early Career Researcher Award. For the second time, in 2021, the journal Internet Histories has invited any interested early ... [more ▼]

This special issue is the result of our second call for the Internet Histories Early Career Researcher Award. For the second time, in 2021, the journal Internet Histories has invited any interested early career researchers (masters students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral researchers) whose research focuses on the history of the Internet and/or the Web, and histories of digital cultures — or any historical topic within the scope of the Internet Histories journal, to apply for the award and to submit an original article. [less ▲]

French National Paths Within a Global Computing Market

in Van Lente, Dick (Ed.) Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing (2022)

In her book The radiance of France, Gabrielle Hecht has shown how France sought to carve out a distinctive role for itself by means of major technological projects (and especially nuclear power). She ... [more ▼]

In her book The radiance of France, Gabrielle Hecht has shown how France sought to carve out a distinctive role for itself by means of major technological projects (and especially nuclear power). She demonstrates how an American system was adapted in order to “make it French” and incorporate political and cultural issues. The same may be emphasized regarding computing in France: there was a desire to play a distinctive role in a market and field which were dominated by the USA. French leaders attempted to pursue a national and creative path, rather than focusing on adoption and appropriation. This chapter aims to shed light on some of the milestones and highlights of French policy by providing a technical, economic and political analysis of the co-construction of computer R&D and industry and the visions of the present and the future that accompanied it. These visions were often embedded in geopolitics and industrial strategies, but the foresight and imaginaries of decision-makers and engineers also played a role in these decades when it came to designing a route to the computerization of society, whether via educational uses or by means of online services and telematics. Based on sources from the French National Institute for Research on Information Technology and Automation (INRIA) and reports from the country’s telecommunications authority as well as material from the press, radio and television and oral interviews, this chapter mostly adopts a top-down approach related to national plans and policies. Such an approach is relatively unusual in this book, as most authors have opted for a more user- or media-oriented analysis or a hybrid method combining several layers of understanding and both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Although societal visions were debated, especially in the 1980s when Minitel and telematics were developing, and although the Plan Informatique pour Tous had a tangible influence on schools and was also highly visible in the media and society at large, our choice to focus on political, engineering and industrial visions aims to shed light on the role of pragmatism, negotiations, tensions and geopolitics in French policies. The latter have rarely been interpreted as “visions of the future” or imaginaries but they may encourage us to view the multiple plans and performative discourses adopted in France (and in other countries ) as useful mirrors (albeit sometimes offering a distorted reflection) that had a real influence on digital strategies. The first part covers the period from the implementation of the Plan Calcul, which aimed to facilitate the development of national research and industry, and the debates over European cooperation to the end of the Plan Calcul. The second section looks at the period from the second half of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s, when French authorities and industry developed some highly original national projects such as Minitel and tried to “computerize society” in a French way. Although the interventionist approach pursued by a government that viewed proactive industrial policy as vital for independence and competitiveness was fiercely criticized at the time, and especially from the 1990s onwards, the withdrawal of the state and the siren calls of deregulation pointed, as we will demonstrate, to a loss of values, projects and even visions for the future, especially regarding a long-term geopolitical strategy for France. [less ▲]

Between marginal and mainstream. Communities and ecosystems at stake

in Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (2022)

The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network a community of ... [more ▼]

The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network a community of researchers, web archivists and professionals, united around a common interest, namely web history and web archives. The 4th RESAW conference, organised on 17 and 18 June 2021 by the C2DH (Centre for contemporary and digital history) at the University of Luxembourg, sought to examine the tension between marginal and mainstream in web history, and to go beyond this binary view. The aim was to study all the nuances, shifts in meaning, difficulties in defining and measuring audiences, as well as the evolution over the course of history of digital practices, content, producers, and communities, from the fringes and peripheries to the centre and the core of the Web. The RESAW conference was also an opportunity to launch the HIVI research project , hosted at the C2DH, and the topics that were addressed at the conference were also related to virality. [less ▲]

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 ▲]

Roundtable : (Digital) Cultural Heritage at risk. Lessons learned for future preservation strategies

Presentation (2022, November 23)

www.c2dh.uni.lu The Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022 shattered long held beliefs and certainties including the idea that all things digital exist in an ephemeral sphere outside of ... [more ▼]

www.c2dh.uni.lu The Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022 shattered long held beliefs and certainties including the idea that all things digital exist in an ephemeral sphere outside of the grim realities of the physical world. Instead, the war emphasized the fragility of servers,data and critical infrastructure to physical threats and their exposure to online attacks. At the same time and thanks to social networks and digital communication tools, new forms of ad-hoc support emerged that gave rise to the agency of individuals in supporting and safeguarding Ukrainian (digital) Cultural Heritage. This round table aims to reflect upon the challenges imposed on these efforts from multiple perspectives – be it from the technical point of view on providing backups and fallback infrastructures up to the impact of data protection regulations and coordination strategies for volunteers. In a discussion between internationally renowned experts we want to take stock in the lessons learned and to understand how to make (digital) cultural heritage more resilient. [less ▲]

“Challenge accepted”. The many sources to catch the history of virality and memes

Scientific Conference (2022, October 20)

Gifs and memes (Kaplan and Nova, 2016), “buzz” on the Web and social networks are inherent to digital cultures since the very first steps of the Web (i.e., Godwin’s Law, Dancing babies, Hamster Dance, cf ... [more ▼]

Gifs and memes (Kaplan and Nova, 2016), “buzz” on the Web and social networks are inherent to digital cultures since the very first steps of the Web (i.e., Godwin’s Law, Dancing babies, Hamster Dance, cf. McGrath, 2019). Virality has developed and changed over time, may it be related to forms (macro images, videos, etc.) and platforms (YouTube, 4Chan, Twitter, TikTok, etc.), audiences, curation and dissemination (with features encouraging spreadability within social platforms), etc., while relying on some patterns that were identified by Shifman (2014), Milner (2018), Jenkins (2009) and others. However, history and diachronic approaches still remain underrepresented in studies of online virality, although Finn Brunton’s Spam, Jason Eppink’s visual history of gifs (2014), or the Memes entry in The Sage Handbook of Web History (McGrath, 2019) can be mentioned. Historicizing virality through times, spaces and platforms is at the heart of the Hivi project at C2DH, University of Luxembourg (https://hivi.uni.lu). While starting to historicize these “Internet phenomena”, may it be Numa Numa Guy, Leave Britney Alone, Grumpy Cat, the Harlem Shake, Distracted Boyfriends, etc., challenges related to sources become more and more obvious: researchers have to deal with ephemerality as well as data overload, with several spaces of heritagization on the live and archived web, with gaps, silences and noises, issues of searchability in web archives, etc. This presentation focused on a case study, the Harlem Shake, to first demonstrate the variety of sources and spaces (physical and digital) that may be used to retrieve and rebuild this phenomenon (i.e., press, audiovisual content, archived web in several institutions, live web and platforms, etc.). It then presented the challenges related to this kind of reconstruction that is also strongly intertwining vernacular and commercial cultures; sound, video, textual contents; local as well as international spaces, etc. [less ▲]

Retrieve me if you can... Women and COVID through Web archives

Scientific Conference (2022, October 18)

The COVID crisis has been a shared worldwide and collective experience from March 2020 and lot of voices have echoed each other, may it be related to grief, lockdown, masks and vaccines, homeschooling ... [more ▼]

The COVID crisis has been a shared worldwide and collective experience from March 2020 and lot of voices have echoed each other, may it be related to grief, lockdown, masks and vaccines, homeschooling, etc. However, this unprecedented crisis has also deepened asymmetries and failures within societies, in terms of occupational fields, economic inequalities, health and sanitary access, and we could extend the inventory of these hidden and more visible gaps that were reinforced during the crisis. Women and gender were also at stake when it came to this sanitary crisis, may it be to discuss the better management of the crisis by female politicians, domestic violence during the lockdown, decreasing production of papers by female research scientists, homeschooling and mental load of women, etc. In December 2021, our AWAC2 team submitted several topics to the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) community and invited the international organization to select one of them that the team would investigate in depth, based on the unique IIPC Covid collection of web archives. Women, gender and COVID was the winning topic. As a cohort team within the AUT (Archives Unleashed Team) program, the AWAC2 team benefited from a privileged access to this collection, thanks to Archive-It and through ARCH, and from regular mentorship by the AUT team. It allowed us to investigate and analyse this huge collection of 5.3 TB, 161 757 lines for the CSV on domain frequency CSV, 8,738,751 lines for the CSV related to plain text of web pages. Accepting the challenge, the AWAC2 team organized a datathon in March 2022 in Luxembourg to investigate and retrieve the many traces of women, gender and COVID in web archives, while mixing close and distant reading. This panel, chaired by Valérie Schafer, aimed to present this research, entwining technical, epistemological, and methodological issues and challenges with our results. Valérie Schafer began the panel by presenting an overview of the project, including a presentation of the IIPC corpus, of the AUT cohort program and of the research topic. Karin de Wild and Joshgun Sirajzade presented the AUT tools and interfaces, the technical challenges of the corpus, the choices we made (and notably with regards to multilingualism) as well as the tools and methodologies that were used. Finally, Susan Aasman and Sophie Gebeil presented some results and challenges of this research. [less ▲]

Les Influenceurs. Une plongée dans les pratiques et cultures numériques

Speeches/Talks (2022)

Le jeudi 13 octobre 2022 de 17.00 à 18.30, une table ronde co-organisée par la BnL et le C²DH réunissait Natascha Bintz, Luca de Michele, Anne Faber et Ben Olinger sur le thème «Les Influenceurs. Une ... [more ▼]

Le jeudi 13 octobre 2022 de 17.00 à 18.30, une table ronde co-organisée par la BnL et le C²DH réunissait Natascha Bintz, Luca de Michele, Anne Faber et Ben Olinger sur le thème «Les Influenceurs. Une plongée dans les pratiques et cultures numériques». Nous avons abordé avec eux leur parcours, leur ligne éditoriale, leur lien avec leur audience, mais aussi les enjeux culturels, économiques, professionnels, genrés ou encore technologiques de leur activité. [less ▲]

Combiner lecture proche et distante: l’exemple de la viralité en ligne

Presentation (2022, September 13)

Cette intervention s’intéressera à la combinaison de la lecture proche et distante, des échelles micro et macro, en proposant de réfléchir aux enjeux, outils, défis et parfois limites de ce qui est ... [more ▼]

Cette intervention s’intéressera à la combinaison de la lecture proche et distante, des échelles micro et macro, en proposant de réfléchir aux enjeux, outils, défis et parfois limites de ce qui est qualifié de scalable reading . Des recherches en cours sur la viralité en ligne et les mèmes, et notamment le cas du Harlem Shake, seront pris pour cas d'étude, avant d’inviter les participants à penser à leur tour leur sujet en terme de scalable reading . [less ▲]