[Commlist] CFP 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)).

Read the full CFP here: 
https://publications-prairial.fr/balisages/index.php?id=775

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.
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