Balisages, Issue 5 (2022): 30 years after the Web… Big Bang in knowledge institutions?

Call for papers: Balisages (Issue 5, December 2022):
30 years after the Web… Big Bang in knowledge institutions?

Guest editors: Ghislaine Chartron (Professor CNAM Paris), Benoît Epron (Professor HEG Geneva) and Pascal Robert (Professor Enssib – ELICO UDL Lyon)

April 1, 2022: Deadline for abstracts (3,000 – 5,000 characters)
July 15, 2022: Full articles due (30,000 – 40,000 characters)

Proposals should be sent to: Ghislaine Chartron ((ghislaine.chartron /at/ lecnam.net)), Benoît Epron ((benoit.epron /at/ hesge.ch)).

Call:

In 1989, when Tim Berners Lee developed the Web to share knowledge among scientists, he may not have been aware of the knowledge revolution he was about to initiate. The Web has progressively hybridised with other innovations (mobile apps, social networks, etc.) and new paradigms (participation, platforms, the semantic Web, open access, data science, etc.), shaking up the way we think, design, act and how we pass things on to others. A little more than thirty years later, what has happened? How can we compare, in a diachronic line, the production and circulation of knowledge in the post-web era, at a time when profound transformations in the elaboration of knowledge are also at stake?

The claim of users’ power to act has become omnipresent, new authorities want to take shape (Broudoux, Ihadjadene, 2020), multiple forms of editorialisation have developed (Bachimont, 2007) (Epron, Vitali-Rosati, 2018), (Scopsi, 2018), extending, hybridising the traditional process of publishing and knowledge production. Platforms ensure, in all sectors, direct connections between authors and readers, teachers and learners, museum collections and Internet users, reorganising in part the entire cultural industries (Bullich, Schmitt, 2019). The semantic web promotes cross-fertilisation between content producers (Bermes, 2013). The knowledge commons are being deployed and they aim to make access to knowledge easier (Le Crosnier, 2015).

Every ecosystem of knowledge production and circulation has thus considered the urgent need to innovate, at the risk of being out of step with digital and societal transformations marked by a wave of self-production, participatory organisations, easy access, and knowledge diversity…

Thus, publishers, booksellers, libraries, universities, and museums have constantly adapted to this new situation: projecting their catalogs into the web of data, opening participatory spaces for collection and debate, and installing discovery tools for optimal discoverability of resources, particularly those in open access (Chartron, 2017). There have been multiple digital transformation strategies. But is this enough to consolidate their space, their role as mediators of knowledge in an environment that has become overabundant, animated by a great diversity of actors and in particular a few largely dominant international platforms (Rebillard, Smyrnaios, 2019)?

This issue of the journal Balisages should help us take a step back on what has happened in this transformation of the circulation of knowledge, to draw up its controversies, and perhaps to outline its future and the balances in reconstruction.

We have chosen to focus this issue on the institutions that have so far been involved in the mediation of knowledge for various publics: libraries, documentation centres, universities, publishers, museums… The issue is positioned on the side of the service offer and the strategies of associated actors. How have these institutions evolved, transformed themselves, in terms of their missions, the services they offer, and the renewal of their skills? What repositioning and renegotiations have taken place in their respective value chains? Have new organisations and new alliances been established?

In this issue, we seek contributions that address the following two research areas: the political economy of the web and service innovation/design.

1 Political economy of the web

The analysis of the digital transformation of knowledge institutions conveys the renewed dimension of the actors’ strategies, and in particular of web-based technological entrants—notably, the digital giants. On the web, relations have visibly hardened between content producers and tech players who have become dominant and unavoidable (Smyrnaios, 2016), (Chartron, Broudoux, 2015).

The public regulator at the European and national levels has been very much in demand in this political economy of the Internet, in order to preserve the balance (Bourreau, Perrot, 2020). The regulatory frameworks have evolved: a new copyright directive marked by the creation of a neighbouring right for news publishers allowing them to receive a financial compensation when their articles are reused online, the obligation for platforms (social networks, online video services, etc.) to enter into agreements with rights holders, in order to be insured when users post copyrighted content without agreement or authorisation. The ebook and its standardisation process within the web is also marked by multiple negotiations, mergers and unfinished convergences through the history of the IDPF and the W3C (Sire, 2021). More globally, the power games and power relationships with all the W3C standardisation bodies play a decisive role in the reconfiguration of knowledge production/circulation (semantic web standards, XML technologies, browsers and publication tools, promotion of Open Source, etc.). What role do knowledge institutions play in this? The seemingly free content largely financed by Google also asks us to read between the lines… The expected contributions should help us to decipher these multiple dimensions:

-How are relations evolving between technology players and those involved in the production and mediation of knowledge? -What strategic moves can we identify over the past 30 years: reconfigurations, disappearances, public-private partnerships, the role of start-ups, dependence on Big Tech? -Are there still standards, future developments specific to services provided by knowledge instituions that are not defined by the W3C key players? -What role have national and international public policies played in supporting the transformation of knowledge institutions? What regulations have been put in place? -Finally, can we affirm the emergence of new systems of knowledge authorities? Or, on the contrary, can we say that the legitimacy of traditional knowledge institutions has been reinforced by crises such as the Covid-19 crisis, with its related phenomena of disinformation (Touitou, 2017)?

2 Innovation and service design

If it seems important to question the political economy of the Web and its impact on knowledge institutions, it is also clear that this context has accompanied the emergence of new services, self-organised communities (Cardon, 2019), and various self-productions on local, national, and international scales. Bottom-up innovation characterises the history of the web, but the question now is also to appreciate the keys to the sustainability of these innovative services, beyond the creative phase facilitated by the many open access tools.

A characteristic dimension of knowledge institutions is that they have amplified their role as content producers in recent years. Thus, libraries want to consolidate their editorial and publishing role (Kovacs, 2020), and the challenge of promoting and putting digitised heritage online has also become a priority. The management of research data, but also the opening of learning centers and fab labs (Simon, 2015) mark repositionings for which design thinking methods often play a central role (Beudon, 2019) (Soubret, 2020). Do these new services correspond to a repositioning of values?

Contributions should provide field insights on innovation and service design:

  • What assessment can be made of the promises made by web technologies (semantic web, social web, data web), and even massive data technologies in service innovation for knowledge institutions? – In what way has a new deal been set up by the open movements intrinsically linked to the Web (open source, open access, open data, open science, etc.)? – How can we appreciate the “media evolution” of some institutions that produce more and more content? – How does the renewal of skills accompany the development of these services?

Finally, with the hindsight of these 30 years after the advent of the Web, it is expected that the various contributions will open up historical and anthropological perspectives on the evolution and mutation of knowledge institutions in our society.

Important dates:

December 1, 2021: First call for papers
April 1, 2022: deadline for abstracts (3,000 – 5,000 characters)
May 2, 2022: invitation to submit full paper
July 15, 2022: deadline for reception of complete papers for review
September 15, 2022: end of review process
November 1, 2022: Final version of full articles due
December 15, 2022: publication of the 5th issue of the journal Balisages

Important note: no payment from the authors will be required.

Submissions in both French and English are welcome.

Proposals : 3,000 – 5,000 characters (including spaces)
Full papers: 30,000 – 40,000 characters (including spaces)

See journal guidelines on text formatting and citation policy : https://publications-prairial.fr/balisages/index.php?id=415

Article proposals should be sent to the coordinators of this special issue in the format of their choice (doc, odt or md) : Ghislaine Chartron ((ghislaine.chartron /at/ lecnam.net)), Benoît Epron ((benoit.epron /at/ hesge.ch)). Manuscripts will be subject to 2 blind peer reviews by a peer review committee; members are selected according to their field of expertise upon receipt of articles.