Special issue edited by Francesca Musiani (ISCC, CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC) and Valérie Schafer (ISCC, CNRS, Paris-Sorbonne, UPMC).

The rise of ‘digital heritage’ calls for empirical investigations on both its publics – existing or expected/envisaged – and its promoters, producers, preservers (Mussou, 2012). These investigations also need to explore institutions and their policies – public and private, collective and individual – shaping preservation and archiving practices in this field. The controversies that these policies raise (e.g. those that concern the ‘right to be forgotten’ and the right to memory), as well as the interactions of public authorities with preservation institutions (or among these institutions themselves), are interesting to analyze for the light they shed on the socio-technical and political dimensions of ‘digital heritage’, as it becomes institutionalized.

The practices and procedures contributing to the shaping and the legitimization of digital heritage entail a number of choices, trials, tests, intertwined ‘scales of action’, and a social “work” undertaken by a variety of actors, including professional associations, amateurs, the public at large, libraries, museums, research groups volunteering to be in charge of specific archiving tasks or initiating preservation policies, international institutions or clusters of entities such as UNESCO or the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

A number of dynamics have contributed to shape, qualify and define ‘born-digital’ documents as heritage: the creation of the Internet Archive foundation in 1996, followed by the appearance of its famous Wayback Machine (allowing to look for, and explore, specific feats of the Web past) and Brewster Kahle’s project to archive the “entire Web”; the Archive Team’s ‘rescue’ of online spaces such as Geocities or Mobileme; the institutional archiving of the Web, since 2006, by French institutions such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel; the archiving of Twitter by the United States Library of Congress. All these dynamics are a testament to the plurality of actors engaged in this process, their incentives, their objectives at times complementary, at times divergent.

Insofar, ‘born digital’ heritage has been investigated with less attention than ‘digitized’ heritage (Dufrêne, 2013 ; Bachimont, 2014). Moreover, its exploration needs to be associated with reflections on another type of heritage, which may be defined as ‘heritage of the digital’ or ‘digital technologies as heritage’ and is constituted by hardware, software and related documentation, preserved and displayed thanks to the efforts of individuals, associations, museums of science, technology and computing, and a number of increasingly successful exhibitions (dedicated, e.g., to video games). These different directions converge towards a process of ‘heritagization’ (defined as patrimonialisation by Davallon, 2006), which is also worthy of exploration.

What do digital heritage (and the processes of heritagization) tell us about the relationship of our societies to their heritage, and to the digital itself? What happens when it is no longer enough to ‘digitize’ culture, but culture is, at once, digital? What are the consequences on heritage and is uses – social, cultural, political, economic and scientific?

Research directions

By means of empirical investigations, this issue of RESET wishes to contribute to shed light on the policies that shape, manage and develop digital heritage (Illien, 2011), as well as the actors and the issues underlying processes of heritagization. We propose three (not exhaustive) research directions for this theme, within which articles may be embedded (but do not necessarily have to): The shaping of digital heritage (Axis 1), Digital Heritagization (Axis 2), and Digital heritage and social legacy (Axis 3).

The shaping of digital heritage

This axis will analyse the emergence and the ‘shaping’ of digital heritage, since UNESCO’s Charter for the Preservation of Digital Heritage has legitimized its exploration as a matter of pressing concern (2003 ; see also Lusenet, 2007).

Investigations addressing the issues, the strategies of appropriation of digital heritage, the perimeters of its preservation, as well as comparative studies of policies and preservation tools between different countries or actors, may find their place in this axis.

Digital Heritagization

The study of discourses and ideologies accompanying these initiatives and the analysis of the publics of these digital cultural forms will allow to precise the contours of a digital heritage – and a heritage of the digital – which is in the process of finding its shape(s) and its social, political and economic dimensions. The diversity of actors involved in the processes of heritagization also opens up the possibility to undertake analyses of their incentives, motivations, strategies, interactions.

Digital heritage and social legacy

Digital heritage needs to be embedded in a long-term perspective, which encompasses the relationship of societies to their heritage, so as to interrogate continuities and ruptures (Oury, 2012). Indeed, it calls for a renewed reflection on the notions of ‘common goods’ and ‘immaterial heritage’ (Jadé, 2012), the universality versus the geographical boundaries of heritage (Di Méo, 2008), the issue of the ‘patrimonial valuation’ of documents, or that of the ‘social status’ of objects (Davallon, 2006). Deserving attention are also the patrimonial value that some communities may attribute, e.g., to the preservation of specific discussion groups (Usenet communities, Google Groups etc.), or the willingness to pass knowledge of new forms of communication and expression on to future generations.

Finally, we need to take into consideration the articulation of these issues with ‘data markets’, broadly conceived, which are presently thriving; in particular, research would do well to explore the legal and judicial questions raised in terms of civil liberties, copyright, the preservation of personal data integrity, the right to be forgotten and the right to be remembered (Dulong de Rosnay, Musiani, 2012).

Calendar and practical information

The abstracts (700 words maximum) are due by December 15, 2014. They should be sent to the following address: journal.reset@gmail.com.

The proposal, written in either English or French, should state the research question, the methodology, and the theoretical framework used. It will focus on the scientific relevance of the proposed article in light of the existing literature and the call for papers, and may be accompanied by a short bibliography.

We would like to draw the authors' attention to a special section called Revisiting the Classics, devoted to new readings of classical authors and theories in light of the Internet.

The abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by the issue coordinators and the members of the editorial board. Authors of submissions selected at this stage will be asked to e-mail their full papers by May 5, 2015.

The journal Reset also accepts submissions to its “Varia” section, open to scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences dealing with an Internet-related object or method of research.

Contact

The Editorial board: journal.reset@gmail.com

Coordinators:

francesca.musiani@cnrs.fr

valerie.schafer@cnrs.fr