LostMa aims at understanding how human cultures are constituted and evolve, through the question of the transmission of written cultural artefacts. It strives to establish in what measure the transmission (and subsequent preservation or loss) of written artefacts, texts and ideas deviates from pure chance, and, if it deviates, by how much and why it does. It will do so by analysing the way that texts in manuscript form were copied, transformed or destroyed, in a similar way to the evolution of living organisms or of language variants, through process of innovation/mutation, fixation or extinction. As such, the goal of this project is not only to understand the processes behind the transmission of texts, but also to grasp the extent to which humans are the actors of the transmission of their own culture and how much the survival of texts or the constitution of cultural canons are due to chance. If this notion may seem provocative to humanities researchers, evolutionary biologists have long discovered the role of random drift in the survival or extinction of genetic traits and species. To investigate this question, this project will attempt a paradigm-shift in philological methods, by combining artificial intelligence, complexity science and philological expertise. Stochastic birth-and-death processes and computer multi-agent simulations will be used to emulate the process of textual transmission. A case study will be taken, regarding chivalric literature in European context. Supported by deep learning methods, large-scale data collection will be made on a corpus of 4000 documents in Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages, with a full-text zoom on approx. 1000 Old French manuscripts. Data will provide observable values to be compared to simulation results, in order to measure deviations from chance, make inferences on non observable values such as loss/survival rates of works and manuscripts, and understand the dynamics at work behind the transmission of texts.

<< Objectives >>The first objective of the project is to set up and disseminate an innovative training course aimed at training tomorrow's professionals in the management of colonial heritage as well as in the logics that govern its production. The second objective is the definition and dissemination of a training course for professionals in charge of the treatment of French-speaking colonial archives with a view to their inclusive and democratic management.<< Implementation >>These objectives will be implemented through two main activities. The first is the design and dissemination of a course unit on Francophone colonial archives and their management. The second activity is the drafting and dissemination of a manual on the treatment of this heritage. Aimed at archive managers and users, it will propose a methodology and sharing of experiences regarding the inclusive and democratic management of cultural heritage.<< Results >>This project aims to achieve two main results. The first is to train students from partner institutions and, more broadly, anyone interested in the question of colonial archives and their management as well as the issues underlying them. The second is to train professionals in charge of the treatment of colonial archives as well as their users, both Belgian and French, in the inclusive and equitable management of this heritage.

Medievalists must grapple with the following commonly acknowledged issues: - most texts and documents written during the mediaeval millennium in Europe are in Latin; - the reference tools used when studying that material are often ancient, awkward and deficient; - our knowledge of the semantic structure of mediaeval languages is still in its infancy; - the modes of access to the documents have changed drastically but are still not entirely efficient: the bulk of digitised medieval documents has increased to such an extent that large-scale formalised computer processing is now becoming possible. For the time being, digitilisation projects have mainly consisted in converting documents from paper to digital form without implementing new tools which would enhance their digital potential. The issue at stake calls for action on three fronts: - existing tools (first, the Glossarium de Du Cange and the Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis) must be collected, harmonised and widely disseminated (free access and user-friendly interface); - a task force of medievalists should be set up to study the impact of social evolution on the structures of mediaeval speech and writing.; - digitised documents must be subjected to large-scale formalised computer processing in order to shed new light on these structures. This programme may seem ambitious indeed, but not unrealistic: 1. OMNIA is managed by three well-established institutes, renowned for their historical and linguistic scholarship (École nationale des chartes, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, UMR 5594). They have gained a national and international reputation for their expertise in the field of digital-edited historical documents ; they have the technical infrastructure and master the digital tools (XML/TEI, OAIS) thus guaranteeing that OMNIA will be available quickly on the web; their websites offer a large array of historical sources (www.enc.sorbonne.fr ; www. irht.cnrs.fr ; www.artehis.cnrs.fr); ENC and IRHT have put together TELMA (Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives, www.cn-telma.fr), a centre for digital resources which will contain the results of projects subsidized by ANR in 2006 such as LEPOR, managed by J-L. Ferrary and CAPETIENS, managed by X. Hélary. TELMA takes part in DARIAH, a European project which promotes Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities. 2. OMNIA will be supported by a European network of research groups in charge of compiling dictionaries of mediaeval Latin. First of all, the International academic union, which holds the copyright of the Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis and which is managed by a French team (the lexicography department of IRHT, partner n°2), has agreed to have this document published on the internet. The development of query tools will benefit from the long-existing cooperation between European scholars dedicating their work to mediaeval lexicography; the expertise acquired by OMNIA and the technical platform put together by the 3 partners can support the digital publishing of various European dictionaries that has been planned but not yet carried out. Foreign scholars involved in these projects have given their support to OMNIA. OMNIA will also benefit from the expertise of Robert Morrissey, professor at the university of Chicago, and Mark Olsen, manager and assistant manager of ARTFL (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French language) who are also the designer of the Philologic software. Ultimately, the OMNIA project aims to build up an encyclopaedia of mediaeval Latin to be made freely available on the Internet, offering both traditional reference tools and current research in an interactive way. It will offer tools for semantic and historical analysis based upon the processing of digital corpora. This encyclopaedia, which will be progressively enriched by national and international scholars, will deepen our understanding of mediaeval society. The OMNIA partners, who have been working together for some time and have focused their attention on digital technologies, are seeking the financial support that is necessary to create and offer online a tool which will benefit international scholars in all fields of mediaeval studies, be they historians or philologists.

Grapheme based Retrieval and Analysis for PaleograpHic Expertise of Middle Age manuscripts The GRAPHEM project is a multi-disciplinary project that is based on rich medieval manuscripts corpus. It has two ambitions: • to contribute to the creation of a true objective and scientific paleography; • to create accurate methods for accessing to the contents of these manuscripts, using word-image similarities (Word Spotting, Word Retrieval). The richness and diversity of the writings (of Latin language) will allow us to elaborate and test shape descriptors that will be used in the two applications. A particular caution will be held on the study of graphemes as pieces of strokes holding relevant information. The laboratories composing the consortium are the LIRIS, the IRHT, the LIFO, the CRIP5 and the Ecole des Chartes. They worked together a few years ago on a project aiming to the exploration of medieval manuscripts. This project was part of the “Société de l'information” program of the CRNS and was entitled “Formes et Couleurs, outils de recherche”. It was in this context that the roots of GRAPHEM were constituted. However, the expected results are of a different kind. In the case of the paleography, we will aim at the development of knowledge and the formalization of the domain. The methods of access to the the textual content of medieval manuscripts are to be used in other contexts than the medieval manuscripts. They have a semiotic nature and can be called alternative solutions to the optical character recognition methods (OCR).