From Paper to Screen. Cultural Changes, Generic Transfers, and Mediapoetics of the French Press – Numapresse

Numapresse intends to offer a new cultural and literary history that will highlight the structural themes of the press in France from the nineteenth century to today. It will rest on the digitization of newspapers—implemented through the successive campaigns developed under the impetus of heritage libraries and museums—on the creation of new digital tools and on a methodology uniting the contributions of literary studies, cultural history, and information and communication sciences. Rather than emphasising the paradigm of a radical break, Numapresse intends to prove to the contrary the existence of historical genealogies, which appear paradoxically since now we read the old press essentially on the screen. Numapresse will thus place the remediation of the printed press under a digital format at the centre of its considerations, and propose the application of protocols and technologically innovative reading tools to these newly digitised texts, inspired by contemporary tools of digital information production.
Numapresse will focus its study on the practices, poetics and imaginary characteristics of media culture and in this sense, the project will continue the scientific exploration undertaken for the nineteenth century by La Civilisation du journal (2011) and by the Medias 19 project (www.medias19.org). But this program will rely on new methodologies as yet undeveloped in France, related to the digital, and is based on an entirely new research paradigm. It relies on groups that have been renewed and expanded to new disciplines such as information and communication sciences and history. It extends its expertise to the XXth century. Numapresse especially aims to relate this long history with the contemporary era and the upheaval induced by the emergence of digital journalistic devices. In effect, the project makes the hypothesis that a cultural and literary study of the contemporary press, shows, despite the crisis in the printed press, the existence of the perennial facts existing around the recycling, in narrative journalism, of the hybridization between fact and fiction, among other things.
The work on the digitalized press will enable us to highlight elements of media poetics analysed on a large scale, that only automated data-mining methods can reveal: virality, characteristics of authorship, recurrent rhetorical constructions. Emergence and stabilization of media genres will be recognized by the development of tools, which, in the testing phase, already show remarkable results. Such phenomena open up to a new conception of writing in the media, which combines individual creativity, the collective game of journalists copying from one another and the constraints related to journalistic formatting.