Journal presentation

Balisages is Enssib’s biannual online peer-reviewed journal welcoming submissions in French or English.

Balisages explores issues at the intersection of book history, library and information science, information and communications sciences and the anthropology of knowledge. The journal aims to promote critical inquiry into informational, discursive and symbolic materialities specific to all documentary forms and media, including printed books and digital documents, paper and data.

Balisages seeks to question the issues and tensions, in the world of libraries and documentation, arising from information and communication processes and the technologies that shape them. The anthropological approach that Balisages wishes to develop emphasizes the concrete and material dimensions of knowledge production and circulation as embodied in the tools, techniques, places and gestures of knowing as practice.

Such knowledge techniques and technologies always imply ideological and power effects. By exploring technical forms and formats and their cognitive, communicational and political dimensions, Balisages opens up a new space for examining the tools of intellectual work from past to present.

Sections

Each issue proposes 3 different sections:

• A topical theme with a call for papers

• A Varias section which welcomes articles outside of the theme

Procedure

The articles are assessed by an editorial board made up of internationally recognised researchers specialised in the topical theme. At least half of the members of the editorial boards are researchers belonging to institutions located outside of France.

Authors can respond to calls for thematic papers from Balisages posted on the following websites: Enssib, OpenEdition (Calenda), Société Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (SFSIC) and broadcast across researchers networks.

They can also send their articles spontaneously to the Varias section on balisages@listes.huma-num.fr and submit works for review. The articles in this section are also subject to a blind review by at least 2 reviewers.