Thierry Bardini

Who is Thierry Bardini?

Thierry Bardini is a French sociologist who has undertaken all of his academic career to date outside of France. He is a full professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism.

Thierry holds a degree of "ingénieur agronome" and his first work was on agriculture production systems. He wrote his PhD thesis on technical systems in agriculture. He also did fieldwork on the history of agriculture in Venezuela and on a multi-disciplinary research project around the jack-bean Canavalia ensiformis agriculture and similar topics in Venezuela, before working in the United States on innovation diffusion under the direction of Everett Rogers at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He then left for Université de Montréal.

Thierry Bardini has authored many papers and books on innovation, sociology of technology, and hypermedia: he is the author of Bridging the Gulfs: From Hypertext to Cyberspace, where he described the history of hypertext through the visions of two early pioneers in the field: Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson.

In 2000, he published Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, a book about Douglas Engelbart's career and the rise and fall of the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute