2025 ECREA Communication History Workshop

5 Feb 2025, 09:00 → 7 Feb 2025, 18:00 Europe/Zurich

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

WELCOME TO THE HOMEPAGE OF THE 2025 ECREA COMMUNICATION HISTORY WORKSHOP 

Communication Networks Before and After the Web: Historical and Long-term Perspective

 

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The 2025 ECREA Communication History Workshop is part of a series of events organized by the ECREA Communication History Section. These workshops take place every two years in a different European city, gathering scholars from around the world whose research explores the historical dimension of media and communication.

The 2025 ECREA Communication History Workshop was held from February 5 to 7, 2025, at CERN—the birthplace of the Web and a pivotal institution for the spread of the Internet in Europe. The event aimed to explore communication networks before and after the development of the World Wide Web.

The workshop hosted a prestigious lineup of keynote speakers, including Nicole Starosielsky (University of California), Robert Cailliau, François Flückiger, and Pier Giorgio Innocenti, offering unique insights into the evolution of communication infrastructures and their broader implications.

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Adress:                                                                                          

CERN                                                                                             

Esplanade des Particules                                                                      

1217 Meyrin                                                                                  

Switzerland

 

Access: Building 55

 

Conference Rooms:

Wednesday:

-Room 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

Thursday:

-Room 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

-Room 28/S-029

Friday:

-Room 6/2-004

-Room 6/2-024 - BE Auditorium Meyrin

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Ecrea_Program.pdf

Guide to join the ECREA Conference Workshop on Zoom.pdf

Wednesday 5 February

Roundtable

1 In the footsteps of the early Web

Speakers: Robert Cailliau, Francois Fluckiger, Pier Giorgio Innocenti (ALICE)

Thursday 6 February

Paper Networks: News, Infrastructures, and Communities in History

2 Network Disappearance: Changing Valuation of Newspaper Carriers as News Networks

Speakers: Fredrik Stiernstedt, Anne Kaun

3 Network of Fellowship, Debate and Exchange: Amateur Journalism and Nineteen Century American Youth Culture

Speaker: Peggy Cassidy

4 The Carnation Revolution between censorship and freedom: Journalistic Networks in Dictatorial and Democratic Regimes.

Speakers: Jacinto Godinho, Carla Baptista

5 Diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the Austrian news media landscape since 1848: Insights from the Austrian News Media Infrastructure project

Speakers: Andreas Schulz-Tomancok, Eva Tamara Asboth, Gabriele Melischek, Julian Wenger, Michael Alexander, Josef Seethaler

6 Epistolary networks: reconsidering the history of communication technologies.

Speaker: Jerome Bourdon

Telecommunication’s Networks: Making, Dismantling, Maintaining Nervous Systems

7 Manufacturing Switzerland. The first telegraph network as a workshop for the 1848's Constitution

Speaker: Riccardo Ferrigato (USI - Università della Svizzera Italiana)

8 The vast nerve system’: journalism, telegraphy, and empire at the Glasgow Herald (1873-1883).

Speaker: Chris Silver

9 Telegraph Towns: A Cultural Ecology of Transoceanic Wireless Landscapes

Speaker: Matt Parker

10 The poles that never died: a material history of dismantling the landline communication network in Sweden

Speaker: Julia Velkova

(Pre)Histories of the Web

11 HyperCard, or the hypertext for the rest of us. An evolutionary analysis of its life cycle.

Speaker: Carlos A. Scolari

12 CD-ROMs as connectors in the early development of the Web

Speaker: Valérie Schafer

13 Priming for the web: Pre-histories of the Danish web

Speaker: Niels Brügger

14 Portugal's Digital Dawn: Investigative Journalism, Hacker Communities, and the Rise of the Internet (1991-1995)

Speakers: Vânia Maia, Jacinto Godinho

15 Decentralised Media and Emergent Cultures in Web History: Narratives from Blockchain Integration to Social Media

Speaker: Ashwin Nagappa

Colonial and anti-colonial communication networks: origins, entanglements and continuities

16 From the “Black Atlantic Communication Network” to #BlackLivesMatter: Addressing Short Memory in Digital Media and Communication Studies

Speaker: Wendy Willems

17 The Digital Imperium

Speaker: Lee Grieveson

18 Networks of Domination and Violence: Colonial Communication and Power

Speaker: Burçe Çelik

19 Creating a Network for Colonial Propaganda: The Angolan Broadcasting Plan, 1961-1974

Speaker: Nelson Costa Ribeiro

20 British Imperial Broadcasting Networks, 1939-1989

Speaker: Simon J. Potter

Localizing Imaginaries, Rhetoric, and Metaphors of Networks (1960s - 2020s)

21 Networks Against the Internet: a History of Concept Through the Lens of Countermovement Rhetoric

Speaker: Anya Shchetvina

22 The never-ending promise of video as an alternative media network

Speaker: Susan Aasman

23 Imagining Revolutionary Connections: the Fax as Proto-Internet

Speaker: Jesper Verhoef

24 From Digital Cities to Networked Societies: Vernacular Socio-technical Imaginaries of the Public Web between 1994 and 2004

Speaker: Nathalie Fridzema

25 Networked Mediality: (Re)assembling the Imaginaries of Black-Boxed Technologies from the Stars to the Data Points

Speaker: Natalia Stanusch

Visible and Invisible Networks, Visible and Invisible Societies

26 Narrating Eurovision’s first Decade on Swiss TV: Making Visible Transnational Network Infrastructures

Speaker: Anne-Katrin Weber

27 Continuity in Transition: The Evolution of Spanish Television Networks from Franco to Democracy (1959-1989)

Speaker: Javier Jurado

28 Rewired: Imaginaries of technologically networked crime and police work in HBO’s The Wire

Speaker: Torbjörn Rolandsson

29 Raw Punk: Glocality, Creative Processes, Inner Logics and Networks

Speaker: David Andersson

30 (Hidden) Ties between Media and Politics? How networks of politicians and journalists evolved from the analog to the digital

Speakers: Alessandra Colaceci, Christian Wasner, Thomas Birkner

On the Earth, In the Sky: Transportation, Satellite, and Alarming Networks

31 Nautical charts are not networks

Speaker: Lars Lundgren

32 Produced A Demand for an Island: Military Satellite Communications, Ground Bases and Empire.

Speaker: Rachel Hill

33 The pan-arab satellite network, 1990-2015: narratives and affects

Speaker: Marwan M. Kraidy

34 The Acoustemology of Sirens: A Century of Urban Communication Infrastructures of Fear and Public Sonic Warnings

Speaker: Marie Cronqvist

35 An Iberian nordvision? Transnational Integration and Protectionism: The Role of Television in Iberian Dictatorships.

Speaker: Rita Luís

The Past is Emergent: Transformation and Continuities in Networking

36 Trolling from the past: the heavy legacy of the world's first vaccine coverage and the anti-vaccine leagues counterpart

Speakers: Hernâni Zão Oliveira, Helena Lima

37 "Opening the doors to cyberspace and discovering this was a hospitable territory": Community Memory, an electronic social network in the pre-digital age

Speaker: Julie Momméja

38 Understanding the Continuity and Transformation of Mobile Media Over Time: Insights into the Dynamics of Communication and Control

Speaker: Elif Grant

39 The transformation of networks through mobility and the inclusion of cities as a territory of social practices

Speakers: Eduardo Campos Pellanda, Mágda Rodrigues da Cunha

40 Communication and networks before the digital age

Speaker: Christine Davidsson Sandal

Keynote speech Nicole Starosielski, chair Andreas Fickers

Friday 7 February

Social Networks (Whatever it Means): Origins and Changes in Networks’ Cultures

41 Virtual communities by post: The hobbyist computer magazine as a network forum

Speaker: Kevin Driscoll

42 Historicizing Gaming Cultures as Networked Cultures

Speakers: Erik Koenen, Christian Schwarzenegger

43 Skyblog stories

Speaker: Emmanuelle Bermès

44 The glocal genesis of Facebook tracking, 2010-2025

Speakers: Rasmus Helles, Klaus Bruhn Jensen

45 Understanding the Social Network of WeChat

Speaker: Yinan Sun

The Materialities of Wireless and Wired Networks: Transmitters, Imaginaries, Connections

46 Reclaiming Wires: Antecedents to networked communication

Speaker: Chris Scheidler

47 Towers of Prestige: Dutch Radio Transmitters and Public Relations

Speaker: Vincent Kuitenbrouwer

48 Forging Networks: Imagining national, international, and local radio spaces in early Canadian radio

Speaker: Anne MacLennan

49 The cultural and political significance of broadcasting transmitters in Wales

Speaker: Jamie Medhurst

50 A History of Bluetooth

Speaker: Inga Schuppener

Computer Networks: Histories, Imaginaries, Thinking

51 Can three computers agree? Computer scientists and the political imagination of 1980s distributed computing.

Speaker: Steve Jankowski

52 Computers as Infrastructure. On the new Digital Environment in the Swiss Federal Administration, c. 1990

Speaker: Mirjam Mayer

53 BBSes and Fidonet: connecting computer users before social media.

Speaker: Michał Owczarek

54 Network Thought Before the Web: From Metaphor to Archetype

Speaker: Leah A. Lievrouw

55 The end of the network hope?

Speaker: Paolo Bory

“Seeing” Research Networks. Indexes and Communication Networks for (Astro)physicists

56 Science Citation Index: Mapping the Networks of Science

Speaker: Lai Ma

57 The War Map of Science. Citation Indexing and the Statistical Order of Knowledge

Speaker: Xavier Nueno

58 Pioneering experiences in the creation and uptake of Usenet newsgroups for astrophysicists (1983-1994)

Speaker: Monica Marra

59 The Physics Preprints Exchange Network

Speaker: Phillip H. Roth