Data

Recension de Jérôme Denis, Le Travail invisible des données. Éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales, Paris, Presses des Mines, 2018, 206 pages

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas.

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With a focus on education, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that question a certain historicism. It renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize visual media while presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of régimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices.

Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them – or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities.

In this study, we describe the results of a series of co-creation workshops in museums with the goal of designing future digital cultural collections. Ranging from exhibition teasers to comprehensive virtual galleries, digital collections are an increasingly prominent feature of many museum websites but remain a largely unexplored facet of the visitor experience.

Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber historicise the concept of "repairing things" with a view to broadening and redefining the emphasis of current debates on repair as a "new social movement" and the emergence of a "repair society". These current discourses often lack a sense of the long history of repairing things which saw ups and downs in cultures of repair and self-repair. The chapter charts out the heterogeneity and interrelatedness of the actors involved in repair over time.

Ce numéro de Signata vise à poser la question de l’archive d’un point de vue sémiotique et sémio-pragmatique. On entend ici par « sémiotique » non pas une discipline unique, mais une pluralité de manières de questionner le sens, les formes et les valeurs au sein des disciplines historiques, sociologiques, philosophiques, linguistiques, médiatiques, artistiques, etc. Le but du dossier est ainsi la constitution d’une cartographie qui embrasse les différentes approches qui, dans le domaine de l’archive, peuvent faire émerger les questionnements liés au sens.

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to allow data-driven and visualisation-based search, exploration and interpretation. Most such interfaces integrate close and distant reading and represent semantic, spatial, social or temporal relations, but often lack contrastive views.