A Francophone Project on Nineteenth-Century Journalism and Journalists: Médias 19

Despite numerous studies of the French and francophone press published since the second half of the twentieth century, scholars in France have long been cautious in approaching and valuing nineteenth-century print culture. The situation is, however, changing with Médias 19, a scholarly research group¹ established in 2011 that focuses on print and media culture, especially nineteenth-century journalism in France and Canada. The group was established as a scientific committee that included scholars from around the world and was supported by a Franco-Canadian grant (Agence Nationale de la Recherche-Fonds Québécois de Recherche Scientifique et de Culture). Its aim is to gather together scholars and students who are interested in journalistic issues. What follows is a summary of the many resources visitors may find on our user-friendly and well-designed website (http://www.medias19.org).

Médias 19 is a collaborative digital scientific platform edited by Marie-Eve Thérenty (University of Montpellier) and Guillaume Pinson (Laval University) that offers a wealth of resources, including announcements and CFPs on all aspects of nineteenth-century journalism, mainly in francophone countries; annotated editions of nineteenth-century journalistic texts; and fiction and scholarly essays on journalism, (see "Editions"). All publications are available in PDF format to users under a Creative Commons licence (which requires them to cite the name of the original author and to avoid modifying or making commercial use of the contents). The research group peer-reviews submissions and welcomes proposals for developing the site. The carefully edited contents can be accessed with an efficient search engine ("Chercher sur le site").

The "Editions" section provides a digital library of annotated nineteenth-century texts pertaining to journalism (fiction, memoirs, essays, chronicles, and reports). Of special interest is the "Anthologies" sub-category, which publishes finely annotated editions of original texts. Philibert Audebrand's Un café de journalistes sous Napoléon III, for example, provides invaluable information on journalistic networks during the second half of the nineteenth century. Another section on the site, "Notices Biographiques," offers a dictionary of nineteenth-century journalists (for example, Adolphe Bitard, Adolphe Gubernatis, and Gustave Vapereau) from press dictionaries of the period with links to the original documents.² Like Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor's Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009), Médias 19 provides supplements to the somewhat incomplete nineteenth-century dictionaries (http://journalistes.medias19.org). Access to this page is currently restricted to students and scholars engaged in the project, but the project aims to provide open access in the future. Médias 19 welcomes suggestions and proposals from scholars and is committed to accessibility.

Another valuable resource offered by the platform is a substantial series of links to digitized newspapers and periodicals from French, Canadian, US, and European libraries. However, the various projects housed on Médias 19 are not linked to Gallica, the digital platform of the National Library of France (http://www.medias19.org/index.php?id=10575). Nevertheless, the site does offer a clickable world map identifying the countries and cities where newspapers indexed on the site were published, thus demonstrating the global dimensions of nineteenth-century journalism, as well as the ongoing globalisation of modern digitization programs.

The "Publications" section of Médias 19 includes scholarly peer-reviewed publications on media culture, mainly in France, Belgium, and Canada, which approach periodical studies from various perspectives (e.g., literary history, sociology, socio-criticism, and discourse analysis), thereby allowing users to trace the development of nineteenth-century francophone media studies. Examples include "La recherche sur la presse: nouveaux bilans nationaux et internationaux" (Micheline Cambron and Stéphanie Danaux, eds.); "Les Mystères urbains au XIX^e siècle: Circulations, transferts, appropriations" (Dominique Kalifa and Marie-Eve Thérenty, eds.), which includes a fascinating map of the "urban mysteries" of journalism across the world; "L'Atelier médiatique de l'histoire littéraire" (Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, ed.) on Théophile Gautier as a literary historian; and "Le journalisme francophone des Amériques au XIX^e siècle" (Guillaume Pinson, ed.). Finally, the platform's "Actualités" section includes...