Since the mid-2000s, some US and British news organizations have hired programmers to design data-driven news projects within the newsroom. But how does the rise of these “programmer-journalists,” armed with their skills and technical artifacts, really affect the way journalism can contribute to the public good? Based on an empirical study in Chicago, we show in this article that although they have built on previous historical developments, these programmer-journalists have also partly challenged the epistemology conveyed by the computer-assisted reporting tradition in the US, grounded in the assumption that data can help journalists to set the political agenda through the disclosure of public issues. Involved in open source communities and open government advocacy, these programmers and their technical artifacts have conveyed challenging epistemological propositions that have been highly controversial in the journalism community.

This paper provides an ethnographical study of the ways in which infrastructure matters in the production of knowledge in the social worlds of rare diseases. We analyse the role played by a relational database in this respect, which exists at the crossroads of a large and complex network of individuals, institutions, and practices. This database forms part of a “boundary infrastructure”, in which knowledge production constitutes one output of infrastructural work, that needs to be articulated with other kinds of activities and matters of concern. We analyse how members of the network negotiate the place and forms of knowledge production in relation to these other purposes, and highlight the political nature of the distinction between knowledge and information, which frames collective action. We also show how infrastructural inversion serves to articulate knowledge production with other forms of mobilisation, thereby shaping and reconfiguring the boundary infrastructure as a whole.Keywords: knowledge infrastructures, boundary infrastructures, relational databases, rare diseases

International audienceThe appearance of the first newspaper websites fifteen years ago gradually called into question the social sciences' research on journalism. This article reviews the international literature on that research and highlights both the historical continuities and the discontinuities of journalists' activities. Six main themes are apparent throughout: technical innovation in the press; the production of on-line news; Internauts' contribution to news production; changes in professional identities; the economic models of the on-line press; and the uses of information on the internet.Voilà quinze ans que les premiers sites web de journaux ont vu le jour, questionnant peu à peu les études de sciences sociales sur le journalisme. Cet article propose une revue de littérature internationale de ces travaux, en faisant apparaître à la fois les continuités historiques des activités journalistiques et les ruptures à l'œuvre. Six questionnements se dégagent de l'ensemble des recherches : l'innovation technique dans la presse ; la production de l'information en ligne ; la contribution des internautes au travail de l'information ; la recomposition des identités professionnelles ; les modèles économiques de la presse en ligne ; les usages de l'information sur internet

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Institut national du service public. © Institut national du service public. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.