The aim of the research project is to understand how the Franciscans used literature in French as a communication tool in order to spread Franciscan ideology in the lay society between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Indeed, the Franciscan order appears as a remarkable organisation of cultural production and diffusion, inscribed in the networks of economic and political power : it put in circulation literary works in French that were designed as didactical and ideological supports accessible to lay people who were away from the clerical world. Two main tasks will be carried out during the research project: the establishment of an exhaustive repertory of "Franciscan works in French", which will allow the cataloguing of medieval French texts of Franciscan origin in the form of an open source relational database MySQL; the examination of a first corpus of Franciscan texts made up of the French lives of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi, which will be the subject of a philological, literary and bibliological study. The project will question how Franciscan writings, by configuring a new form of "literary preaching" in the context of the court conceived as an emerging "mediatic society", ensured the elaboration and transmission to the ruling classes of a Franciscan norm conceived not only from a dogmatic perspective, but from a spiritual one in the broadest sense, embracing the different aspects of creation in a harmony of human beings (social dimension) and living beings ("ecological" dimension). In general, the establishment and examination of the corpus of Franciscan writings in French will pave the way for a new paradigm in Medieval literature studies by defining the contours of a "literary franciscanity" in vernacular.

The project REERS intends to establish a European research network to study the apparition, not of the scientific discourse itself, but a metacritical discourse on science, emanating from those who develop and spread new knowledge, and the objective of which is to examine the inside of the foundations of their approach, to legitimize the value and usefulness of knowledge produced, and to define the special status of the people dedicated to it. This discourse does not still appear in the scientific literature itself, henceforth known by the experts, nor in the correspondence between scientists, of which important studies exist or are underway, but rather in a new category of texts, the appearance of which coincides with the creation of the first official institutions that aim at organizing and funding the work of scientists, academies, and which now address a new readership perceived as an instance of major recognition, the public space, at which is now aimed directly or indirectly, periodical publications from major European scientific institutions: the Journal des Savants, History and Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, or Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, as well as several specialized journals. Such research seems only to be able to bear fruit in the large framework of a "Republic of Science", the nature of which deserves to be questioned since the development of the scientific discourse is inseparable from its broadcast, its reception and the mobility of those actors of the new knowledge inside the European area, in particular major European centers of scientific production. The upstream limit of the chronological framework is the publication of the first periodicals of scientific distribution (1665, Journal of Learned Men, Philosophical Transactions), and downstream, the creation of the Institute of France (1795), coinciding with a profound transformation of political and scientific institutions in Western Europe. This network aims at bringing together international experts (historians, historians of science, ideas, philosophy, literature, digital humanities specialists) working on the scientific metadiscourse, interested in the discussions about the validity and the utility of science, on the "researcher" status, the relationship between individuals and institutions and the political institutions that finance them. Ultimately, this work should allow to understand more clearly the appearance, the evolution and the consolidation of still operational concepts, particularly those of "scientific policy", of "expertise", or strategies of dissemination of scientific knowledge in the public sphere. The proposed corpus, large and heterogeneous, is presently available in digitized versions, in image mode, but remains hardly usable by means of IT query tools. Its use by traditional methods, in SHS, would require a considerable human investment, a systematic perusual of several hundred volumes of diverse nature (text, images, graphics, mathematical formulas), of complex nature. We therefore suggest to work on the development of a collaborative digital platform with scan with optical character recognition, of correction, of enrichment and scientific annotation and interpretation of the texts, on the model of a social network, offering at the same time to the scientific community free access to a reliable digital corpus, endowed with state-of-the-art query tools, and which can be of interest the researchers from a multidisciplinary perspective: history, history of science and ideas, philosophy, letters as well as mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, anatomy, etc.

Throughout history, philosophers have valued literature for its cognitive, emotional, and ethical effects: literary fiction has the potential to help understanding complex situations, to provoke ethical experiences and new qualities of feelings (c.f. Wittgenstein). The arts and humanities have always been central to education for their role in creating decent citizens. Yet, as signaled by M. Nussbaum (2010), the primarily goal of todays education is to teach students to be economically productive rather than to become knowledgeable and empathetic individuals. This damages our competence to keep a decent world culture. The Cog-HuLiCe project aims at valuing investments in social and moral skills of students, by considering that in addition to economic skills, such personal skills acquired through education benefit to the whole society as a common good. Cog-HuLiCe contributes to this goal through the investigation of how and why consuming literary fiction can affect human cognitive and affective processes. Our basic hypothesis and the theoretical frame underlying this project were developed in 2013, following the publication of “Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind” by Kidd and Castano in the journal Science. This study showed that reading literary fiction (LF) but not popular fiction (PF) instantly improves a reader’s aptitude to understand the mental state of others (i.e. “mentalizing” skills). Based on our previous research on language processing, in Cog-HuLiCe we assume that language processing in general can provoke a genuine experience of the signification of words and sentences by way of mental simulations (c.f. embodied language processing). These mental simulations, in turn, can modulate affective and pro-social behavior. Critically though, while such language-induced simulations certainly depend on multiple variable (e.g. content), we assume that the strength and quality of these simulations also hinge on simple stylistic elements of narratives. These stylistic elements distinguish LF from PF. Our project focuses 3 objectives: i) identifying differences in the use of specific stylistic elements in LF and PF. ii) demonstrating that the stylistic elements that are characteristic for LF and PF engage the brain in different ways. iii) Determining the consequences of reading fiction on affective and pro-social behavior. The latter point constitutes a first step towards determining the cultural and ethical dimensions of literary experience. We will also track cultural differences in reading habits and literary style via large-scale online surveys in Germany and France to correlate these features with measures of personality traits and interpersonal sensitivity. Since what we read matters, cultural differences in reading habits and authors writing style could suggest that certain personality traits might develop differently in different cultures. Cog-HuLiCe is an interdisciplinary project that is based on expertise in cognitive neuro-sciences, philosophy of language and art, linguistics, and literature. The outcome of this project could orient the pedagogy of reading and literature toward the type of texts that help developing acculturation in the society (through the development of social abilities such as mindreading and empathy). It could also help identify the type of pedagogical approaches toward texts that will enhance the beneficial effects. The resulting guidelines from this project could be quickly implemented with the use of little budget because they will principally concern directions on the kind of existing literature that should be promoted for educational purposes.

The ROIi (Rey's Ornament Image investigation) project brings together researchers in the fields of the history of ideas, literature and the history of books (Ihrim) on the one hand, and computer vision and machine learning (Hubert Curien Laboratory) on the other. The aim of this collaborative and interdisciplinary project is to design a tool to help authenticate books published under fictitious or counterfeit names or addresses in the 18th century, through the analysis of ornaments. It is based on the design of a database of ornaments used by the bookseller Marc Michel Rey (1720-1780). The editorial and commercial practices of this French-speaking bookseller based in Amsterdam are indeed particularly representative of both the typographical uses of ornaments and the strategies for circumventing censorship. The study of these editorial strategies is enlightening in order to understand the booktrade system and the way in which the sharing of knowledge and ideas on a European scale was practised at a time when it was beginning to be defended philosophically. These strategies make it particularly difficult to attribute a work to a publisher and to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit works. The investigation of ornaments then constitutes an additional clue to identify the works, within a cluster of concordant clues. The database will thus be associated with an anomaly detection task, combining computer vision and automatic learning. The objective is to design a decision support tool likely to reveal differences in shape at the level of wood ornaments and the publisher's mark, and differences in typographic style at the level of compound ornaments, based on the content of the database's data. Patch detection and auto-encoding will be developed to be confronted or combined in order to deliver tangible visual elements on demand, with patch analysis approximating the mechanisms implemented during a visual comparison of facing images, the auto-encoders producing an efficient representation of the data in unsupervised mode. This tool will be blindly tested on collections of ornamental images attributed to Marc Michel Rey, but also on fakes recognized by experts, before being tested online and in open access, and eventually transferred from Marc Michel Rey's collection to other heritage collections.

The BIPULUM project aims to identify and study the public libraries existing in France in the 18th century, from the perspective of urban history, political history, and the history of cultural practices. It aims to understand how emerges, even before the Revolution, the idea of the library as a “public service”. In the kingdom, nearly fifty towns had a public library at the end of the 18th century, that is, libraries open to an undifferentiated public, without considering the legal status of the collection, which may depend on a city, an academy, an university or an ecclesiastical community. Led by Emmanuelle Chapron, professor of Early Modern History and professor of Book History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the project is based on a partnership between the UMR 7303 Telemme (Aix Marseille University, CNRS), the UMR 5713 IHRIM (Lyon II, CNRS), the Centre Jean-Mabillon (École Nationale des Chartes) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. By adopting an overall and comparative perspective, associating researchers, librarians, and archivists, we will try to understand the role of these institutions in the cultural and political evolutions in progress. We don’t claim to affirm that these institutions were key places of the Enlightenment (which they were probably not, or at least not all of them), but we make the hypothesis that they were part of crucial cultural changes, by establishing a public reading space in the heart of the city. Three aspects will be carefully considered: the moment of the foundation considered as a political project; the way in which a “public service” was developed and daily experienced, at a time when (if not the syntagm, as least) its idea was emerging; the identity of the public (traditionally overlooked in the history of libraries) and the uses they made of the collections. The project aims to produce an online instrument (with Heurist), enriched with new documents on the history of ancient libraries. Local, comparative, and global research will be collectively confronted and published. Valorisation and open science activities, developed in partnership with the libraries, will include exhibitions, video presentations of the project, visits and conferences. By taking advantage of the public's interest in the history of objects, places and collections and their heritage value, the project will connect researchers, professionals and users around a shared object, the public library.