CCIs: publishing, the challenges of a digital revolution

The book, representative of university culture

Books are a vital part of university culture. Today, publishing is facing profound disruptions linked to digital technology, and Emmanuelle Chapron, Professor of Modern History at Aix-Marseille Université, examines the consequences for the academic world. In her view, the digital conversion of the book industry and the massive digitization of old library holdings, which began some twenty years ago, are profoundly transforming the way academics work, as they now have access to entire libraries and bookshops at the click of a button. Databases and bibliographic portals are changing research practices by making it easy and intuitive to locate previously unknown or inaccessible sources and references. These new ways of searching and reading raise questions that we must not shy away from, such as how to build up these seemingly unlimited corpora, how to master the reading itineraries created by digital browsing, and the need to recontextualize what they bring to the surface.

The importance of the book as a material object

But these rapid evolutions, from the written word to the screen, have also led us, in a reflexive movement in the opposite direction, to rediscover that books have a smell, a texture and a format, that libraries convey positive emotions, are spaces of sociability and bring communities together. A few years ago, the hashtag #MontreTaBibli revealed the power of connivance provoked by the staging of researchers' working libraries on social networks. Cognitive sciences highlight the role played by three-dimensionality and layered structure in the appropriation of intellectual content. In the humanities and social sciences, there is an oscillation between the obvious interest in developing these resources and the acute awareness of the phenomenological and epistemological loss caused by the distancing of objects of study that are increasingly cut off from the body. Rather than opposing digital resources and paper objects, we need to understand what can underpin the "taste for the library" in the Internet age, and invent other ways of apprehending the materiality of objects through their digital substitutes.