Valérie Schafer
Valérie Schafer is a researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences of the Paris-Sorbonne University.
After completing her thesis in 2007 on the History of the French packet-switching networks Cyclades and Transpac, and the technical and professional cultures associated with them, she has made the History of the Internet, the Web and digital cultures her research areas. Since 2014, she is head of the project Web90 (Heritage, Memory and History of the Web of the 1990s) supported by the French National Research Agency, and studies the heritagization of digital materials. As such, Web archives are currently at the center of her interests, both as sources and as objects of study (Governance of Web archiving, Digital Humanities approaches, etc.). She is notably the author of La France en réseaux (1960/1980) (Nuvis, 2012) ; Dans les coulisses de l’Internet. RENATER, 20 ans de technologie, d’enseignement et de recherche with Bernard Tuy, (Armand Colin, 2013) ; Le Minitel, l’enfance numérique de la France with Benjamin Thierry (Nuvis, 2012); La neutralité de l’internet, un enjeu de communication with Hervé Le Crosnier (Les Essentiels d’Hermès, CNRS Editions, 2011) ; and co-editor with Benjamin Thierry of Connecting Women. Women, Gender, and ICT in Europe (Nineteenth-Twentieth Century) (Springer, 2015).
Alexandre Serres
Alexandre Serres is senior lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Rennes 2.
PREFics lab’s member, he is founder and head of GRCDI (Research Group on Culture and Information Didactics) since 2007, and currently participates in the ANR Project Translit. After his doctoral thesis in 2000 on the origins of the Internet and the conditions of the emergence of the Arpanet network (his thesis was awarded the "Computers and Society" prize of CREIS in 2001), he changed his research area but has never lost interest in Internet history, through courses, trainings, articles, blog posts... For fifteen years, his activities are directed towards the problems of scientific and technical information (within the URFIST Rennes and the URFIST Network), and his research has focused on cultures of information, media and digital (through the concept of "transliteracy"), on the issue of evaluation of internet information (in particular he published "In the labyrinth : assess information on the Internet," C & F Editions, 2012), and the reflection on the traces (digital and analog).