A Louise

Ta disparition n’éteindra pas, Louise, l’amitié que nous te portons, le plaisir de te lire, le souvenir de nos projets passés, le regret de ceux que nous avions à venir, l’honneur et la fierté d’avoir travaillé avec toi. Nous pensons et continuerons tous au sein de l’équipe Web90 de penser très fort à toi.

CfP HistoInformatics2017 – the 4th International Workshop on Computational History

HistoInformatics2017 – the 4th International Workshop on Computational History will be held on 6 November, 2017 in conjunction with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017), Singapore. Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always been interested to translate primary sources into data and used methods, often borrowed from the Social Sciences, to analyze them. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora. Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of Computer and Information sciences which are dedicated to the processing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in Biology and Chemistry. The main topics of the proposed workshop are: (1) support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of Computer Science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of historical texts, (3) analysis of collective memories, (4) visualisations of historical data, (4) access to large wealth of accumulated historical knowledge.

This is a highly interdisciplinary workshop that goes beyond traditional computer science topics. The workshop emphasizes non-standard, research-oriented informatics technologies for solving novel research problems and scenarios. Our objective is to provide for the two different research communities a place to meet and exchange ideas and to facilitate discussion. We hope the workshop will result in a survey of current problems and potential solutions, with particular focus on exploring opportunities for collaboration and interaction of researchers working on various subareas within Computer Science and History Sciences.

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Call for Papers for Internet Histories: The 90s as a turning decade for Internet and the Web

This call for papers aims to revisit the history of Internet and the Web within a specific decade that coincides with the Web’s availability for the general public: the 1990s.
How did the course of Internet History change in the 90s? Which continuities and turns, tensions and debates emerged within the Internet community, within digital communities, and more generally within society at large? How can we map the Internet and the Web of the Nineties? Who were the key actors and more hidden figures of their adoption and massification? How can we characterize the digital cultures of the 1990s and reconstruct and revisit them? What did Web browsing meant for Internet users of the Nineties? How can we explain nostalgia today for this past Web?

We hope to explore these questions and many others in this special issue, through global, transnational, national, regional and local histories.

Suggested topics:

  • The mass diffusion of the Internet: its rhythms, patterns, issues, actors, limits
  • The emergence of the World Wide Web and the paths to the Web in the 90s
  • The heritage of previous times, models, projects and achievements in Internet history
  • “Eternal September” and other newcomers on the Internet and/or on the Web
  • The communication around the Internet and the Web (in media, advertisements, political or economic discourses, etc.) and their socialisation
  • The Internet’s commercial turn
  • The history of ISPs and of content providers
  • History of 90s websites and online communities
  • The controversies and debates that involved the Internet and Web during the 90s
  • The Web of the 90s and its relationship with convergent media dynamics/histories of the period (e.g. television, telecommunications, print…)
  • The topic of the Internet and the Web versus “older media” (in press, TV, radio, online)
  • The dot-com bubble
  • Digital archeology and the reconstruction of digital communities and vanished spaces
  • Digital tools and digital humanities for reconstructing and analysing the Web of the 90s
  • Discussions on the place and on the 90s turn within the history of the Internet and the Web (realities, limits, critics…)
  • The nostalgia for the past of the Internet and Web of the 90s

Of course, we encourage and welcome other topics and perspectives on the 90s as a turning decade for Internet and the Web.

 Submissions

The proposals are to be submitted to

benjaminthierry@gmail.com

valerieschafer@wanadoo.fr

explicitly mentioning CFP 90s

They need to fit on one page, detail an explicit angle of analysis and outline, and integrate a short bibliography.

Selected authors will be invited to submit then a full paper through the editorial system, which will undergo full peer review and will determine acceptance of papers for publication.

Calendar

Deadline for the submission of proposals: September 20th 2017

Notification of proposal acceptance: October 1st 2017

Submissions of the full paper (6000-8000 words): March 1st 2018

Feedback based on reviews: April 20th 2018

Deadline for Revisions: June 20th 2018

Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society is an international, inter-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal concerned with research on the cultural, social, political and technological histories of the internet and associated digital cultures.

More information on the journal

Instructions for Authors 

Should you have any questions regarding this CfP, please feel free to contact us: benjaminthierry@gmail.com ; valerieschafer@wanadoo.fr