[Commlist] CFP: Congress Médias 19 - Numapresse (the old press and the new press in the digital age)

* Call for papers: Congress Médias 19 - Numapresse (the old press and 
the new press in the digital age) *

Also available at 
http://www.numapresse.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Appel-a%CC%80-contribution-congre%CC%80s-Me%CC%81dias-19-Numapresse.pdf 


***

International symposium, Paris, Canadia Cultural Centre and at the 
French National Library (BNF), June 8 -11, 2020

***

After a first congress held in June, 2015, Médias 19 and Numapresse are 
organizing a second large meeting that will take place in Paris, from 
June 8 to 11, 2020, and that aspires to map the current state of 
research on the press in the age of the digitization of corpora.

The franco-quebecois scientific project Médias 19, centered around the 
digital platform www.medias19.org <http://www.medias19.org>, has, 
since 2011, been the development framework of a reflection on 
the journalistic practices of the 19th century, the valorization 
and analysis of corpora, as well as studies on the development of the 
media culture in the francophone space. Since 2017, the international 
scientific project Numapresse, financed by the French National Agency 
for Research (www.numapresse.org <http://www.numapresse.org>), aims to 
propose a new cultural and literary history of the French press from the 
19th century to the present day, by mobilizing the large corpora 
of digitized news and new text and data mining tools.

This congress, organized by Guillaume Pinson (Université Laval) and 
Marie-Ève Thérenty (Paul Valéry University of Montpellier III) 
provides an opportunity to invite researchers to map the current state 
of research. It will consist of four workdays and is based on the main 
themes that have, during the last few years, been at the heart of 
historical and literary research on the press.

The congress will take place in Paris at the Canadia Cultural Centre and 
at the French National Library (BNF). Presentations should be around 20 
minutes. Proposals in French or English (250 words, a succinct CV, 
complete contact details and mention of the institution that you 
are attached to) should be sent by e-mail to the following address, 
before December 1st, 2019: (congresM19Numapresse /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(congresM19Numapresse /at/ gmail.com)>.

Researchers interested in submitting a proposal should know that, for 
all the themes of the congress, transversal and general studies are 
preferred to subjects that are purely monographic. In addition, all 
proposals that do not pertain to one of these axes will also 
be examined. The congress will result in a publication.

1: Viralities and circulations _(_Committee member in charge of this 
topic : Guillaume Pinson)

The vogue of world history and cultural transfers, linked to massive 
campaigns of press digitization, have, during the past few years, opened 
the way for decompartmentalized studies of media corpora. These will be 
considered in their capacity to exchange texts and to reunite reader 
communities from geographical zones that are partly very dense (within 
big media metropolises), and partly diffusely populated (Europe-American 
Atlantic axes, or even colonial communications, for instance). Moreover, 
digital tools have opened the way for circulation and “virality” studies 
(Cordell) that have nothing in common with the usual reading modes 
and painstaking analysis. This way, one can automatically retrieve the 
widespread practices of reprinting articles, some of which being of 
considerable intensity and space. The global success of Mystères 
de Paris (1842-1843) by Eugène Sue – which was quickly imitated and 
gave rise to a mold recovered in every corner of the world, as shown by 
a research project conducted by the Montpellier team of Médias 19 – is 
merely the tip of the iceberg. From now on we have the capacity to 
automatically detect forms of circulation and virality within the 
corpora that are much more furtive to the eyes, but major when it comes 
to the intensity of the reprints: literary works that are forgotten 
today, essays, anecdotes, brief news stories (fait divers), a variety 
of news...

This axis thus invites researchers to reflect on all forms of 
circulation and virality in the 19th century. We will 
privilege synthesizing approaches related to the experience of using 
digital tools. More traditional studies on circulation and 
transfers are, however, also welcomed, on condition that these largely 
elucidate these phenomena of decompartmentalization of corpora. The 
perspective of a world history of the francophone press (project lead by 
G. Pinson and D. Cooper-Richet of the Transfopress-network) will also be 
examined in this axis, amongst other issues: the career trajectories of 
writers and journalists, contacts and linguistic transfers in the press, 
relations between the press and emerging forms of mobility (the rapid 
expansion of the railroad, the development of maritime routes, the 
installment of electronic telegraph networks), cultural studies of 
virality (contemporary discourse on space-time, values and debates on 
new mobilities), material and poetic transformation of the press (the 
start of telegraphy columns, international magazines), etc.

2: For a cultural and literary history of the press in the 20th century 
(Committee member in charge of this topic : Marie-Ève Thérenty)

Numerous recent works on the press, from La Civilisation du 
journal (2011) to the studies conducted by Médias 19, have chosen the 
19th century as research area. However, an important objective of 
contemporary studies on the press has also been to achieve a general 
understanding of the media poetics and media imaginaries of the 
20th century. The 20th century is a crucial moment for the expansion of 
the press, its professionalization, its politicization. It is also 
the moment that the written medium, losing its exclusive character, 
faces the competition of other media (cinema, radio, television) 
that simultaneously influence it. A new temporality, the scansion of the 
weekly, is added to the daily rhythm of the processing of news, through 
the creation of important magazines from the end of the 1920s and the 
start of the 1930s (Candide, Gringoire, Marianne) and afterwards the 
post-war years (L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point). The content 
evolves as well: new subjects, such as sports, cinema or the 
television, impose themselves alongside political or traditional 
cultural news. The complete reworking of the press during the Liberation 
relies on new ethical and thus poetical demands, that were conveyed by 
people like Hubert Beuve-Méry and Albert Camus and had consequences for 
the auctoriality of journalists. Overall, to remedy what were identified 
as the excesses of the 1930s, forms of writings that were said to be 
objective impose themselves, for which some newspapers, such as Le 
Monde, claim to figure as a vehicle. However, we propose the hypothesis 
that the literarization of press writings does not disappear and that 
titles (France-Soir post-war, Libération) or formulas (the weekly, then 
the mook) exist that continue to favor the hybridization of poetics. 
Amongst others, these different subjects could be addressed: 
writer- journalists, the relation between the written press and radio 
and television, the rhythms and

periodicity of information, the issue of the weekly and the magazine, 
the place of sports, cinema and television... in the written press and 
the related poetics, the training of journalists and the issue of 
journalism schools, the emergence of new genres and new formats, the 
development of the reportage, press illustrations (photography, 
drawings, comic strips...), the transformations of social, cultural, 
political representations induced by the press, the comparison of the 
system of the French press with other countries, the issue of women and 
gender in the press... Once again, we will particularly 
welcome approaches that mobilize digital tools, but more 
traditional presentations are also welcomed.

3: Media culture and digital culture or the atelier for nerds (Committee 
members in charge of this topic : Pierre-Carl Langlais and Julien Schuh)

Since twenty years, the old press has been massively digitized. These 
corpora have progressively imposed themselves as the ideal terrain for 
experimentation of hybrid scientific approaches that crosses history, 
sociology, literary analysis, infrastructures related to 
computer science, statistical approaches and automatic language 
processing. The heterogeneity of the newspaper and the size of digitized 
archives have favored the emergence of new interdisciplinary spaces 
(digital libraries, digital humanities, computational literature...) 
and new circulations of tools, methods and concepts between disciplines. 
It has also rendered a form of distant reading more legitimate by 
authorizing multiple approaches: topic modeling, supervised 
classification, detection of reprints, named entity recognition, the 
analysis of layout... The techniques of deep learning and automated 
classification, of word embedding, open up the way for a gigantic 
ensemble of texts and images that has still barely been explored. This 
third topic aims at questioning the emergence of a new ecosystem of 
the digitized press, from the process of elaborating the digital archive 
all the way to new forms of remediations and experimental projections of 
these corpora. It will also provide the opportunity to question 
the methodological effect of these new practices on the 
conceptualization of the research object and the construction of terrain 
and of corpora. This reflexive approach, which crosses 
digital humanities and digital studies could address the following 
subjects: the construction of digital archives (transformative effects 
of OCR’s, the mobilization of digital labor, new infrastructures of 
circulation for digitized texts), the practices of distant reading 
(genre classification, studies on virality and reprint networks, the 
long history of visual poetics), extraction of historical data (bylines, 
advertisers, stock prizes...), remediation of corpora 
(re-editorialization of articles, of data or of fiction published in the 
press, data visualizations...)

4: Re-editorialization of press articles: from collecting to data 
aggregators (Committee member in charge of this topic : Adeline Wrona)

Reading the digitized press means giving yourself the means to point at 
phenomena of migration and recycling that are hard to observe with the 
naked eye and to enter a form of automatic philology which scrutinizes 
variations and republications. On the other hand, producing information 
online means integrating gestures to republish articles within 
the everyday functioning of the editorial office, whether this is done 
by segmentation, recalibration, enrichment or listing. It also 
entails writing under the anonymous watch of search engines, and of 
their referencing which imposes unpredictable writing instructions. One 
of the phenomena most often associated with the digital resides thus in 
the retrieval and the implementation of a diversification of 
materialities that give shape to the text, far from the persistent myth 
according to which the “virtual” would be the synonym of de-materialization.

Yesterday, just like today, the specific feature of the press text is to 
have multiple lives, in multiple media forms, in different regimes of 
temporality, by forming ensembles of variable

geometry. The presentations expected for this axis will analyze 
different phenomena whilst accounting for this logic of 
re-editorialization which transcends singular publications of the medium 
of the daily paper. During the interwar period, certain magazines such 
as Détective have the vocation to valorize the great writers of 
editorial collections, to the point where it is at last the periodical 
that integrates a logic of collecting at once.

We will interrogate different issues particular to this question of 
collection in the analysis of the press of both contemporary journalism 
and the 19th and 20th century; this could for example concern the 
renewed modalities of the act of collecting in the digital regime – 
portfolio, photographic slideshow, and other newsletters; the bylines 
and copyright implicated by the circulation of one editorial model to 
the other, from the generalization of “thiefs” during the July Monarchy 
to the complex definition of “neighboring rights”; we will interrogate 
the value of copying/reproduction, generally considered to be 
an impoverishing factor of the information discourse but rarely analyzed 
in its textual or stylistic reality.
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