Valérie Schafer
Biographic Data
| ID | 376046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Valérie Schafer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Valérie |
| FAMILY NAME | Schafer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHAFER V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Luxembourg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8204-1265 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Internet histories fourth early career researcher award
The datafied web: A round-doc discussion
Following the 6th RESAW conference held at the University of Siegen in June 2025, we extended the conversation through follow-up discussions with selected participants, including both keynote speakers, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Jonathan W. Y. Gray. This round-doc discussion brings them into dialogue with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, and Ian Milligan, creating a space for interdisciplinary exchange. It re-ex…
The making of the datafied web: Media friction, CD-ROMs and institutional data practices
This article analyses the material arrangements and institutional contexts through which data practices became workable in concrete settings before and alongside the rise of the web. It explores how media formats, infrastructures, costs configured the ways data could be stored, circulated, stabilised and authorised. It examines the Publications Office of the European Union, the official publisher of the Official Journal, legal texts and informati…
Denis Maréchal, Europe 1: De la singularité au déclin (1955-2022) , Paris, Le Bord de l’eau, 2023, 276 pages
Les sources nativement numériques: Enjeux de documentation et de redocumentarisation
La constitution, la préservation et l’exploitation de sources nativement numériques impliquent, au-delà de leur documentation, une « redocumentarisation », qui consiste par exemple à produire des métadonnées supplémentaires conditionnant leur archivage et leur accessibilité ou à garder une trace des opérations nécessaires à la reconstruction des documents, au prix, parfois, de transformations. Ce patrimoine redocumentarisé requiert une très grand…
What the history of women and computing teaches us
This paper aims to explore how an entry through the perspective of women and gender has revitalized and still revitalizes the history of computing, STEM, and digital technologies and to what extent this approach also aligns with current IT challenges as well as educational issues. It revisits key themes such as invisibility, intersectionality, embodiment, and inclusiveness, by drawing on significant works from recent decades
Parutions
editorial reviewed
Ouverture des données et archives du web: Enjeux, pratiques et limites
BnF DataLab Projet BUZZ-F
The third internet histories Early Career Researcher Award
Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference
The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents …
All your image are belong to us’: Heritagization, archiving and historicization of memes
From the ‘Dancing baby’, ‘All your base are belong to us’ and the ‘Hampster dance’ in the second half of the 1990s to Bernie’s mittens at the US presidential inauguration, through to ‘Disaster girl’ and ‘Distracted boyfriend’, among others, memes have become an important part of our (visual) digital culture over the last 20 years. This article demonstrates why memes should be considered a critical part of our born-digital heritage, by examining t…
Parutions
editorial reviewed
Parutions
partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France.Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit
Incarner la défense et la découverte du monde animal
Arpenter et sillonner les archives du Web
Cet article analyse en trois temps, correspondant à trois approches méthodologiques des archives du Web, la manière dont la recherche a évolué sous le double effet de nouveaux modes d’archivage et d’accès, développés par les institutions, et des questionnements scientifiques. Il revient sur des projets, de Web90 entre 2014 et 2018, dédié aux cultures numériques des années 1990, à l’actuel projet Hivi (Une histoire de la viralité en ligne), en pas…
L’animal médiatique, au croisement des études animales et de l’histoire culturelle
Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society ed. by Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick
peer reviewed
Media persistence: Theories, approaches, categorization
Despite the fact that new media are continually seen as “natural born killers” of old media, old media rarely die and very often persist. In what is alternately called the “age of the Internet,” the “digital revolution,” the “metaverse,” the era of “artificial intelligence,” old media such as books, cinema, radio, television, analogue photography, and several others are still in use. Moreover, there is a kind of re-emergence of “the analogue” in …
Parutions
« La double vie des supports ». Stock, archives, diffusion à l’INA
This article examines the way in which the dystopian television series Black Mirror fictionalises the futures of storage-related technologies. Based on the analysis of three episodes, this article questions the dystopian character of two fictional innovations and the ethical issues that underlie them, as well as the way in which transhumanist storage and the updating of data can lead to a reconfiguration of the relationship to the self, to the wo…
Préserve-moi ! Des journaux intimes à ceux de confinement dans les archives du Web
Souvent éphémères, les pages personnelles, les blogs et aujourd’hui les écritures de soi et intimes sur les réseaux socio-numériques, jusqu’aux journaux de confinement nés lors de la crise COVID, sont toutefois partiellement préservés dans les archives du Web. En explorant leur conservation, notamment au sein de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, et les limites et défis que posent ces sources nativement numériques, il s’agit de saisir les enjeu…
Le CD-Rom, une histoire à graver
Cet article aborde l’histoire du CD-Rom en France en le replaçant dans la famille des disques optiques qui se développent dans les années 1980-1990, dans la convergence entre médias et informatique, et souligne son rôle de chaînon manquant dans l’histoire du numérique, au moment où se joue aussi la transition entre Minitel et Web. Si le CD-Rom a bénéficié d’un moindre intérêt historiographique, son caractère multimédia, les nouvelles formes d’écr…
Stocks et agences de presse. Un entretien avec Michael Palmer
This article examines the way in which the dystopian television series Black Mirror fictionalises the futures of storage-related technologies. Based on the analysis of three episodes, this article questions the dystopian character of two fictional innovations and the ethical issues that underlie them, as well as the way in which transhumanist storage and the updating of data can lead to a reconfiguration of the relationship to the self, to the wo…
Stocker. Penser et placer le stockage au cœur des pratiques médiatiques et communicationnelles
Parutions
International audience
Paris and Nice terrorist attacks: Exploring Twitter and web archives
The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even hours after the attacks, to a ‘real-time’ institutional archiving by the National Library of France ( Bibliothèque nationale de …
Introduction: Internet histories
peer reviewed
L’ogre et la toile. Le rendez-vous de l’histoire et des archives du web
In dialogue with the main theoretical foundations of historical epistemology, this article examines the issues, the expectations and the practices created by the sudden appearance of the archives of the web in the sphere of contemporary history. Between new materials, the heritage of the subject and the continuity of methods, it is a question of understanding the future redefinitions of the role of the historian
Media persistence: Theories, approaches, categorization
Despite the fact that new media are continually seen as “natural born killers” of old media, old media rarely die and very often persist. In what is alternately called the “age of the Internet,” the “digital revolution,” the “metaverse,” the era of “artificial intelligence,” old media such as books, cinema, radio, television, analogue photography, and several others are still in use. Moreover, there is a kind of re-emergence of “the analogue” in …
Global technologies, glocal approach: A false paradox
This article seeks to identify the factors that have led researchers to root their historical approach in a national or regional context, rather than a global one. This may seem paradoxical when the Internet is thought to be global, and digital content and cultures at least partially cross-borders. These approaches are determined by reactions to a history of the Internet that has been far too focused on the United States from the outset, by a des…
Quand la communication devient patrimoine
Si la communication a connu une patrimonialisation en amont du numérique, le patrimoine nativement numérique (ce que les Anglo-Saxons qualifient de Born Digital Heritage) défini par l’Unesco en 2003, semble en élargir les contours, le périmètre, les acteurs, en prenant en compte des formes plus triviales et des composantes plus « ordinaires ». Nous entendons montrer en quoi le xxe siècle a préparé le terrain de cette évolution, symptôme de l’inté…
Net Neutrality as an Internet Governance Issue: The Globalization of an American-Born Debate
Les évolutions récentes de l’Internet et de sa valeur économique globale placent le « réseau des réseaux » au cœur de rapports de force économiques et politiques. Si l’Internet est conçu de manière à éviter le contrôle centralisé, les relations de pouvoir sont loin d’être absentes de sa gestion et posent des questions plus larges que la seule évolution technique. Cet article présente les débats actuels sur la neutralité du net dans le cadre plus …
Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference
The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents …
All your image are belong to us’: Heritagization, archiving and historicization of memes
From the ‘Dancing baby’, ‘All your base are belong to us’ and the ‘Hampster dance’ in the second half of the 1990s to Bernie’s mittens at the US presidential inauguration, through to ‘Disaster girl’ and ‘Distracted boyfriend’, among others, memes have become an important part of our (visual) digital culture over the last 20 years. This article demonstrates why memes should be considered a critical part of our born-digital heritage, by examining t…
The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France
This article, focusing on France, explores the notion of a “Web of professionals” and seeks to establish its factual, epistemological, and methodological implications for the history of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This research reflects on the promises of the New Economy and the roles of the various controversies, cultures, imaginaries, and forms of mediation affecting the business world in its appropriation of the Web. It also aims to reapp…
Sexualités et communication
Quarante ans apres la parution Nouvel Ordre Sexuel par D. wolton en 1974, la revue Hermes consacre un numero aux Sexualites. L'introduction a ce numero revient sur les lignes de force qui ont traverse les contributions selectionnees, a savoir les tensions discursives et interactionnelles, les usages et les representations specifiques a certains medias, et enfin, les controverses publiques qui se sont deployees autour des questions sexuelles. Ce n…
Le mariage de raison du musée d'art et du Web
Évolution du nombre d'accès directs commerciaux à Transpac (1979 - 1985)
Évolution du nombre d'accès directs commerciaux à Transpac (1979 - 1985)
Hosting the World Wide Web Consortium for Europe: From Cern to Inria
This paper studies the role that Europeans have taken in the governance of the Web and the factors influencing the emergence of a new governing body within Europe by means of an analysis of the transfer of the European branch of the new World Wide Web Consortium from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) during the 1990s. In order to understand h…
Le mariage de raison du musée d'art et du Web
Le mariage de raison du musée d’art et du Web (encadré)
Le temps des empires. Une partie à jouer pour les historiens
Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie et John McCarthy: De l'idée au marché : inventions et innovations dans l'informatique
Le Mundaneum, un patrimoine inclassable
peer reviewed
Net Neutrality as an Internet Governance Issue: The Globalization of an American-Born Debate
Les évolutions récentes de l’Internet et de sa valeur économique globale placent le « réseau des réseaux » au cœur de rapports de force économiques et politiques. Si l’Internet est conçu de manière à éviter le contrôle centralisé, les relations de pouvoir sont loin d’être absentes de sa gestion et posent des questions plus larges que la seule évolution technique. Cet article présente les débats actuels sur la neutralité du net dans le cadre plus …
Sexualités et communication
Quarante ans apres la parution Nouvel Ordre Sexuel par D. wolton en 1974, la revue Hermes consacre un numero aux Sexualites. L'introduction a ce numero revient sur les lignes de force qui ont traverse les contributions selectionnees, a savoir les tensions discursives et interactionnelles, les usages et les representations specifiques a certains medias, et enfin, les controverses publiques qui se sont deployees autour des questions sexuelles. Ce n…
In the Shadow of Arpanet and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s
During the 1970s, French engineer Louis Pouzin led a small team of researchers who designed an experimental packet-switching computer network they named "Cyclades." Despite the technical successes of Cyclades-especially Pouzin's "datagram" concept that was adopted by the American networking researchers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn-the French authorities starved Cyclades by 1979 and split up Pouzin and his team. This article describes the opportuni…
Connecting Women: Women, Gender and ICT in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Part of a Whole: Renater, a Twenty-Year-Old Network within the Internet
Internet history cannot entirely reflect the complexity of the network of networks’ genesis and development if it does not take into account parallel or rival projects and national paths. This article shows how the study of a specific network, for example, RENATER (the French National Telecommunications Network for Technology, Education and Research, both a public interest group and a network born in 1993), can also shed light, in a detailed way,…
Quand la communication devient patrimoine
Si la communication a connu une patrimonialisation en amont du numérique, le patrimoine nativement numérique (ce que les Anglo-Saxons qualifient de Born Digital Heritage) défini par l’Unesco en 2003, semble en élargir les contours, le périmètre, les acteurs, en prenant en compte des formes plus triviales et des composantes plus « ordinaires ». Nous entendons montrer en quoi le xxe siècle a préparé le terrain de cette évolution, symptôme de l’inté…
Nos lignes de fractures numériques: Un air de déjà-vu
La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement.Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas pré…
L’ogre et la toile. Le rendez-vous de l’histoire et des archives du web
In dialogue with the main theoretical foundations of historical epistemology, this article examines the issues, the expectations and the practices created by the sudden appearance of the archives of the web in the sphere of contemporary history. Between new materials, the heritage of the subject and the continuity of methods, it is a question of understanding the future redefinitions of the role of the historian
The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France
This article, focusing on France, explores the notion of a “Web of professionals” and seeks to establish its factual, epistemological, and methodological implications for the history of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This research reflects on the promises of the New Economy and the roles of the various controversies, cultures, imaginaries, and forms of mediation affecting the business world in its appropriation of the Web. It also aims to reapp…
Le gouvernement des technosciences: Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945 ed. by Dominique Pestre
Reviewed by: Le gouvernement des technosciences: Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945 ed. by Dominique Pestre Francesca Musiani (bio) and Valérie Schafer (bio) Le gouvernement des technosciences: Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945. Edited by Dominique Pestre. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. Pp. 315. €27/$42.95. This book, edited by historian of science Dominique Pestre, is ambitious in its goals, its theoretical framework (build…
Digital Heritage and Heritagization
In 2016, the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Internet Archive foundation brings to our attention an early initiative of digital preservation and heritagization: no later than five years after the birth of the World Wide Web, and at a moment when it had not yet conquered the general public, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle was already thinking about its global archiving This initiative can be connected to the preoccupation o…
Tell us about
peer reviewed
Introduction: Internet histories
peer reviewed
Internet Histories
Interfacing counterculture and digital cultures: An interview with Geert Lovink
The famous Dutch media theorist and net activist Geert Lovink stood at the crossroads of several players and stages of cyberculture in the 90s, trying to assemble a disparate crowd of media activists and media artists, programmers, designers, cultural producers and researchers. In this interview he looks back at his involvement in Mediamatic magazine from 1989 till 1994, the co-creation of the community access network De Digitale Stad Amsterdam,w…
French memories about the Arpanet: A conversation with Michel Élie and Gérard Le Lann
Although the ARPANET was a United States-funded project that was deeply rooted in US post-war science and technology policies, it had an international dimension from its very early days. The memories of Michel Élie and Gérard Le Lann are oriented towards their US experience. They testify to an early French presence in the ARPANET project at two stages of its history: in 1969–1970, when the first nodes came into activity, and in 1973–1974, when TC…
The 90s as a turning decade for Internet and the Web
This special issue dedicated to the 90s as a turning decade for Internet and the Web highlights the developments and choices – both technical and economic, but also cultural, societal and political – that contributed to the massification of the Internet and the discovery of the Web by the general public
Behind the scenes: An interview with Pierre Beyssac
Pierre Beyssac, who launched EU.org around 1995 and was the co-founder of Gandi, a French company which profoundly disrupted that country's growing market of domain names, reflects on his path from the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. He was one of these discreet but central players of the French Web scene of the 1990s and 2000s, who experienced these tremendous times as a user, then as a “pro-am” and finally as a web professional
Computer Science (39 works) · Political science (29 works) · Art (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Humanities (18 works) · World Wide Web (18 works) · Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts (17 works) · The Internet (16 works) · History (14 works) · French Urban and Social Studies (10 works)