Web Heritage and History in the 90s – WEB90

In addition to the historical research that will allow to collect and preserve both oral and written sources, and contribute significant advancements to Web history in France, the project will allow to explore the questions raised by Web archives (law, corpus creation, representativeness of websites, etc.) Its implementation is divided into three scientific tasks (to which must be added the tasks related to dissemination and coordination).

The first task seeks to contextualize the French Internet and Web, in terms of equipment, tariffs, or content offerings (primarily quantitative approach) and from a political standpoint (regulation, controversies, public debates, etc.), a technical one (evolutions in interfaces, bandwidth, etc.) by comparing these elements to their corresponding ones in the ‘technical leader’ United States, and to use patterns.

“Web experience’, the second task, delves into practices and uses, by studying the Web of the professionals (service offerings, uses within companies), the question of digital identities (user profiles, domain names, anonymity), Web browsing in the Nineties.

The third task, “Issues in born-digital heritage and Web archiving”, is more specifically exploring ‘born-digital’ sources and corpuses. The preservation and exploitation of data issued from digital tools and practices (databases, Web archives, machinimas, software…) call for a reflection on the ways in which digital heritage can modify current research and boost further ones.

Merging approaches in history of innovation and media, social and economic history, this research benefits from recent reflections and developments in the field of Digital Humanities and Internet studies (Code studies and Infrastructure studies in particular).

Among notable achievements to date:
- A thorough work on archives (audiovisual, press, State-led reports, Web archives)
- Several articles published in French academic journals dedicated to the making and the exploitation of born-digital heritage, in particular Web archives, as a result of research and fieldwork observations carried out in the last eighteen months
- Published or forthcoming articles in French and international journals, specifically dedicated to Web history in the Nineties, e.g. on cybercafés (forthcoming), on the Web of the professionals for New Media and Society (published), others are currently under review (e.g. the role of the State and public service on the Web).
- Presentations in national and international conferences allowing exchanges with communities involved in our diverse research subjects: media archeologists, information and communication scientists, digital humanists, media historians, historian community at large, archivists, etc. These exchanges allowed us to compare approaches with other researchers, and enrich our scientific and methodological perspectives.
- The symposium ‘Times and Temporalities of the Web’, held in December 2015 (https://web90.hypotheses.org/programme-ttow), gathered nearly seventy French and foreign presenters over the course of three days. An edited volume is currently produced. The symposium allowed us to delve into our historical approaches to Web history, but also to anchor them in interdisciplinary perspectives
- A Call for papers on born-digital heritage for the RESET journal (https://web90.hypotheses.org/527). The special issue will be released in October 2016.
- A research blog was opened on the Hypotheses website (https://web90.hypotheses.org)
- The ‘Incunables du Web’ and ‘Internet Labs’ project in partnership with the French National Library (BnF)
- Collaboration with the European research group RESAW on European Web archives

Upcoming developments:
- Participation in the symposium celebrating the ten years of the Web legal deposit (BnF/INA), and development of a BnF ‘guided tour’
- TTOW collective book (to be published in 2017)
- book on the Web of the Nineties
- Exploration of possibilities to use DH tools in Web archives (collaboration with the BnF)
- Follow-up to oral interviews
- Writing of several chapters of a SAGE Handbook on Web History
- Co-organization of the RESAW international symposium in June 2017 “Researchers, practitioners and the archived Web” (http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article2249)
- Strong implication in the preparation of an H2020 proposal dedicated to European Web archives.

Valérie Schafer, Benjamin G. Thierry, “The “Web of pros” in the 1990s : The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France”, New Media & Society. Published online before print April 27, 2016, doi:10.1177/1461444816643792
Valérie Schafer, Francesca Musiani et Marguerite Borelli, “Negotiating the Web of the Past”, French Journal for Media Research [en ligne], no 6, La toile négociée / Negotiating the web, 2016, url : frenchjournalformediaresearch.com/lodel/index.php (texte intégral / full text).
Valérie Schafer, Benjamin G. Thierry, « L’ogre et la Toile. Le rendez-vous de l’histoire et des archives du Web », Socio, no 4, Le tournant numérique... et après ?, coordonné par Dana Diminescu et Michel Wievorka, 2015, p. 75-96.
socio.revues.org/1337
Camille Paloque-Berges, Valérie Schafer, « Quand la communication devient patrimoine », Hermès, no 71, 2015, p. 255-262.
Schafer, V., Paloque-Bergès, C., Georges, F., « La culture Internet au risque du Web », Les Cahiers interdisciplinaires de la recherche en communication audiovisuelle, 2015, n° 24, pp. 15-31.

In France, the Nineties have been a particularly important decade for digital networking’s and computing’s « turn to the general public ». A first shift, well-documented today, happens in the Eighties with Minitel, while a second turn is determined by the first developments of the World Wide Web. As of yet, the latter is still a largely uncharted subfield of historiography, from the history of the first ISPs to the birth of professional, administrative or personal websites, e-commerce services, or the rise of a consumer market. A number of debates addressing the roles, the possibilities, the threats embodied by the Web, arise simultaneously. What is the pace of the ‘Internet conversion’ in the professional world and the general public? How can we map the Web of the Nineties? Who were the key actors of the adoption and the massification of the Web in France? What were the modalities of birth for the market of access and consultation via Internet service providers or domain name attribution? What was the development of the oft-cited ‘co-construction’ by market and users of the Internet and the Web, and what was the role of public regulators in it ? What did Web browsing mean for Internet users of the Nineties? These questions have still not been explored by historians, while they address several important issues at the theoretical, methodological and epistemological levels, and they have implications for digital heritage.
Further research is thus needed to:
- measure the disruptive quality of Web technology vis-à-vis the market, developers’ and users’ imaginaires, values, uses and communication
- overcome an exclusively technical history, and conversely, a content-focused one, to aim at a history that is social, economic, political and technical
- take advantage of a pool of Web archives that are both bloated and incomplete, and cannot be apprehended as static, immobile sources
- account for both the ‘digital collective experience’ and for the individual experiences of discovery and use of digital devices.

Beyond the historical investigation, which will allow to preserve both oral and written sources, and lead to significant advances in Internet and Web history, this project also aims at exploring the epistemological, methodological and theoretical issues raised by the appropriation of Web archives: rights, interactivity, representativeness of Web sites, etc.. The operational progress of the project is laid out in five tasks.
The first seeks to “contextualize the ‘French’ Web” at the market level (equipment, tariffs, content offers); at the political level (regulation, public debates); at the technical level (e.g. evolutions in bandwidth, interfaces, code). The French case will be compared, in particular, with the United States, not only a technical leader, but a pioneer in the evolution of user practices. The second task, “Web as experience”, brings user practices to the foreground, by studying for example the Web of professionals (service offers, uses in private sector settings), state services, the issue of digital identities (user profiles, domain names, anonymity), and the act of Web browsing. This task needs to account for a Web that is social, ‘practiced’ and captured by multiple initiatives, actors and experiences. Task 3, “The born-digital heritage and Web archives issues”, is dedicated to digital heritage and its key issues such as reuse, emulation, links between materials, software, scholarly uses... The fourth and fifth tasks (coordination/valorisation) are linked to the previous ones, while reaching out to different associations, Internet protagonists and professionals, academia and the general public by means of independent tasks (e.g. virtual exhibition). To implement this ensemble of interdisciplinary tasks, this Young Researcher project builds on a team of specialists in various fields, including history, sociology, information and communication sciences, semiology, computer science and law.