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Article dans une revue Internet histories Année : 2018

Mailing list archives as useful primary sources for historians

Résumé

This paper aims to show the potential of mailing list archives as primary sources for studying recent history of science. In order to focus on the debates regarding software within the computational chemistry community in the 1990s, the corpus we rely on consists in a scholarly mailing list, a typical corpus from its time, conceived, constructed and maintained by a community. The threaded conversations of the list also constitute a unique rhetorical form in its organisation which is technically bound to the Internet-based media of that time. We first present the issues at stake within our research topic and show how relevant is such a corpus to address them. We then discuss the “ethnographic” characteristics and the structure of the corpus. Its most interesting parts are the “flame wars”, that is outbursts of heated, short and dense debates, in an ocean of evenly distributed polite messages. We unveil how the relevant flame wars are located and extracted by producing a graphical representation of the number of messages per day over time. Once flame wars are isolated, the messages exchanged by practitioners are studied precisely to comprehend the argumentative structure of the debates and the different viewpoints of actors.
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Dates et versions

halshs-01916970, version 1 (10-02-2022)

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Alexandre Hocquet, Frédéric Wieber. Mailing list archives as useful primary sources for historians: looking for flame wars. Internet histories, 2018, Special Section: RESAW - Studying the Web in Web Archives, 2 (1-2), pp.38 - 54. ⟨10.1080/24701475.2018.1456741⟩. ⟨halshs-01916970⟩
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