Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to officially announce the creation of the Center for 
Internet and Society (CIS) of the CNRS.

CNRS is the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, or the French 
National Center for Scientific Research. It is a publicly funded 
research organisation, under the authority of the French Ministry of 
Research. The CNRS is the largest governmental research organisation in 
France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. Research at 
CNRS covers all the major fields of scientific research, and is 
organised into 10 research institutes.

At the intersection of disciplines such as sociology, law, history, 
economics, political science, media and communication sciences, computer 
and engineering sciences, the CIS intends to build critical research and 
expertise, able to enlighten the major technical controversies and the 
definition of contemporary policies related to digital technology, to 
the internet, and more broadly to informatics.

The research themes of the CIS are:
- History of computing, uses, preservation, creativity;
- Information, digital commons, citizen science;
- Infrastructure, AI, platforms;
- Data science;
- State, citizenship, surveillance, profiling, censorship, propaganda, 
fake news.

CIS now has a website, http://cis.cnrs.fr, where you can find more 
details about its activities. We also have a Twitter account, @cis_cnrs, 
which will soon be active!

We are also working on the construction of a CNRS research network (GDR) 
on the same themes, which aims to federate, with a flexible but 
structured system, francophone and France-based researchers on these issues.

Since its inception, CIS is included in several research networks such
as GigaNet <https://www.giga-net.org/> (Global Internet Governance
Academic Network) or RESAW <https://resaw.eu/> (Research Infrastructure
for the Study of Archived Web Materials), and of course, the NoC
<https://networkofcenters.net/> (Global Network of the Internet and
Society Research Centers) and its European Hub.

Kind regards and see you soon, we hope,

The CIS direction team,

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay
Francesca Musiani
Céline Vaslin
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