Montaigne à l'oeuvre/ Montaigne at Work The BVH (Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes) team of the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR: University of Tours and CNRS), has been putting Renaissance works online since 2003, both in textual and image mode. Conceived in collaboration with the IRHT and the Ecole de Chartes, the MONLOE project (Montaigne à l'œuvre / Montaigne at Work) represents the first phase of a multi-format electronic publication programme aimed at compiling an “authors' corpus” intended for a wide audience (researchers, students, secondary school teachers, amateurs). The Montaigne corpus will eventually incorporate all the principal editions of The Essays, the diachronic copy known as the “Bordeaux copy” (annotated by Montaigne in view of a later edition), all the documents featuring Montaigne's signature (conserved in diverse public and private libraries around the world), all his other written works and a selection of the major sources of The Essays. Furthermore, it will include a 3D reconstruction of Montaigne's personal library and an audio version of The Essays. For the time being, priority will be accorded to the principal editions of The Essays, their facsimiles and the Bordeaux copy. Already a rich and complex undertaking in itself, it may be hoped that the online publication of these works will form the basis of considerable future development. Inspired by the “Montaigne Library of Gilbert de Botton”, legated to the University of Cambridge in 2008, the international and collaborative project that is “Montaigne at Work” aims at developing the study of literary creative processes through the transcription and encoding of works in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This enterprise promises to shed considerable light on Montaigne's compositional methods, the additions, corrections and modifications introduced in source texts and compilations, his practise of intervening, the invention of the “essay” and the most significant concepts contained in The Essays (“human condition”, “doubt”, “prudence”, “inscience”, “good faith”, “fantasy”, “que sais-je”, etc.). At the heart of the project, the e-publication of different strata of the “mixed” document (printed and hand-written) that the Bordeaux copy represents will be managed by the integral transcription of chapters structured according to the diachronic shifts. This will involve processing the graphic variation of both Montaigne's hand-writing and the different observable orthographic practises, as well as appropriate linguistic processing: lemmatisation and querying of heterographs, associated with research on lexical configuration. Both an intellectual and a technical challenge, this project will underline the value of this exceptional part of literary heritage, notably through the visualisation of the time-scale of the composition of The Essays, the recognition of the particular status of additions and revisions (published or hand-written), together with the script visualisation that this implies, and the compilation of a philosophical lexicon in the vernacular. A vital part of the global BVH programme, the MONLOE project will use both existing resources and developing methodological approaches to explore new procedures in digital humanities: page by page parallel display of texts and images; annotated textual corpora, permitting several levels of analysis and querying; identification of Montaigne's various “hands”; visualisation of lexical configurations as well as strata. The procedures developed for the recognition of hand-writing and the processing of textual data, as well as the data resulting from the project, will be freely disseminated and thus re-employable by other teams.

The project “La fabrique de l’histoire telle qu’elle se raconte” (the making of History as it tells itself), also known as HISTINÉRAIRES, , has for object the study of the “mémoires de synthèse des activités scientifiques” of the habilitation (HDR) to supervise research submitted in history departments since the early 90s’ to 2010. This yet unexploited material, different from the “travail inédit” which is often published and from the article collection, has become a treasure trove of information about the contemporary historical community. Its examination will enable the establishment of a new sociology of the profession as well as a renewal of contemporary French historiography and its developments, no longer based on the writings of a few well known historians but rooted in a generation’s research paths. It roots from the growing importance of reflexivity among the historian community and relies on the findings of sociology and the history of sciences. The first objective of the project will be to sketch a group portrait of the present-day researchers in history through an analysis of the institutional and intellectual paths. Among the institutional aspects, will be accounted for: the academic path, the time spent teaching in the secondary cycle, the place where the viva was held, the age and gender of the candidate, the members of the jury, the future of the candidate… For the intellectual aspects, data on the volume of production at the time of the viva, the theoretical references made (to social sciences or philosophy), the connections with foreign historiography, the evolution of themes and approaches of research, the inscription into a specific field (cultural history, economical history, social history…), the participation to current historiographical debates, the involvement in community life (answers to the “social demands”, diffusion of knowledge) will be collected. This information will be treated through cartographic and quantitative tools, enabling the establishment of geographical mappings of research and its structuring networks. The second part of the project will investigate how historians interpret their exercise of synthetizing their scientific activities. Whereas some chose to provide a long resume of their accomplishments, others analyzed their personal relationship to the histories they make by sometimes integrating Pierre Nora’s auto-reflexive problematic, which started with his Essais d’ego-histoire. This investigation will reveal the evolution of a still roughly defined exercise. As with the historiographical and/or epistemological debates, the treatment of the data will mostly be qualitative while integrating discourse analyses. This corpus will first be completed and enlightened by oral interviews of HDR tutors, and with a study of its genesis, on April 5th 1988 with the decree on the habilitation to supervise research. The global aim of the project will be to establisha groundbreakingcartography of the community, which would rely on the writings of its members. It is a project of a historiography from below, to use a common term nowadays. From this point of view, the writings’ subjectivity present through the academic canvas, far from being a handicap, will inform research on various institutional and intellectual strategies in action.

Many decisions taken by rational economic agents do not involve markets, but the design of matching and voting procedures, or the use of groups and social networks. The allocation of students to schools, the choice of cases taken up by the Supreme Court or the measure of influence of social agents are all examples of issues which have recently been studied by microeconomic theorists beyond the realm of markets. Moving beyond the strict boundaries of markets and prices, economic theorists now join forces with political scientists, psychologists and computer scientists to better understand the functioning of matching, voting and network institutions. With a few exceptions, theoretical and empirical models of matching, voting and network formation are static. The objective of this project is to develop a new generation of theoretical models of dynamic matching, voting and networks by embedding static decisions in dynamic models represented by Markov processes. The project is subdivided into three sub-projects. Dynamatch is devoted to the study of dynamic matching problems, and will examine multi-stage assignment models with an initial phase of courtship, the assignment of subsidized housing to queuing agents, and of positions in high school and universities to overlapping generations of teachers. Driven by concrete applications in market design, the project involves a dialog with practitioners in social housing and teacher assignment. Dynavote focuses on dynamic voting models, and analyzes the design of multi-stage electoral rules in continuous time, models of optimal apportionment and evolutionary learning of voters over repeated elections. Dynanet is a project on dynamic formation of networks, with applications to networks of influence and networks of innovation. In addition, models of dynamic coalition formation and allocations in cooperative games will be studied in this project. Because dynamic models involve sophisticated behavior on the part of agents, we plan to test the predictions of theoretical models in the laboratory. We plan to implement a series of experiments on school choice, voting and network formation. In the long run, the objective of the project is to advance the research frontier in economic theory, to engineer matching procedures in concrete applications and to cement a community of researchers in France dedicated to matching, voting and network theories.

In France as in most developed countries, designing an efficient system of public financing for long-term care is one of the most striking challenges of the next two decades. But the deep lack of knowledge we face make the task rather uncertain. In this context, the main aim of this project is to establish some quantitative empirical evidences about how economic parameters, such as the private cost of formal home help for disabled elderly, impact their care arrangements. Getting an estimation of the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help and of its effect on informal care will allow us to simulate the consequences of some reforms of the public financing scheme on care arrangements (quantity of home help provided by formal and informal caregivers), on the amount of public resources allocated to the elderly and on its distribution among them, according to income and disability level. Method The scarcity of econometrical research devoted to the impact of the cost of care in ageing economics is mainly due to the difficulty to collect precise data on prices and out of pocket expenditures, since, in many countries, this field of public policy is decentralized: the way public benefits are calculated thus differs according to the geographical location of the claimant. The French minister for health and social affairs will produce next year a specific survey, called CARE, which will include all the information needed to estimate our parameters of interest with standard econometric strategies, but will not be renewed afterwards. We thus propose, first, to use this survey to estimate the impact of private cost of formal help on care arrangement with standard models and methods and, second, to use the results as a benchmark for original alternative strategies, which require less specific data but rely on more sophisticated methods (partial identification) and take advantage on a precise knowledge of the decentralized rules of public financing. These alternative strategies will be implemented with administrative surveys used routinely for the follow-up of APA beneficiaries, the Handicap-Santé survey, which is renew every ten years, and a specific survey, called "Territories", conducted by our research team in 2012, in which we collected information from 73 metropolitan Conseils généraux on their practices regarding home services price-setting and demand subsidization. This gives to the project a methodological dimension since we will be able to evaluate estimation strategies, which could be usefull for analysing other fields of decentralized public policies. Working program Three alternative strategies will be implemented in the first part of the project : 1/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using data of one specific department: in this case, the Territoires survey allows us to calculate the exact private cost of one hour of home help for APA beneficiaries cared by a service whose price was set by the local government. We already have the result for one département and will work on another one to test the robustness of our results. 2/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using a sample of APA beneficiary gathered by the Health minister across 66 départements and partial identification methods : in this case, information is too poor to calculate the exact individual private cost, but the Territoires survey will allow us to establish a range of cost for each department. 3/ Estimating the impact of the amount of formal home help on informal care, through a bivariate model, using the Handicap Santé Survey. The Territoires survey will in this case offer proper instruments for the amount of formal home help in order to deal with the simultaneity of decisions regarding formal and informal care. In the second part of the project, we will use our estimation results to build a simulation model and analyze the impact of various reforms of price-setting and subsidization.

During the last century, WHO have led public health interventions that resulted in spectacular achievements such as the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of malaria from the Western world. However, besides major successes achieved in control of infectious diseases, most elimination/control programs remain frustrating in many tropical countries where specific biological and socio-economical features have prevented implementation of disease control over broad spatial and temporal scales. Emblematic examples include malaria, dengue, yellow fever, measles and HIV. There is consequently an urgent need to develop affordable and sustainable disease control strategies that can target the core of infectious disease transmission in highly endemic areas. Although on the one hand most pathogens are resistant to elimination, on the other hand, paradoxically, human activities are major drivers of the current high rate of extinction among higher organisms through alteration of their ecology and evolution, i.e., their "niche". During the last decades, the accumulation of ecological and evolutionary studies focused on infectious diseases has shown that the niche of a pathogen holds more dimensions than just the immune system targeted by vaccination and treatment. Indeed, it comprises various intra- and inter- host levels at very different spatial and temporal scales. This project aims to shift from disease control to reverse conservation biology of pathogens in order to devise new public health strategies. Our objective is a qualitative understanding of the “niche” of two different pathogens at a fine spatial scale, Plasmodium falciparum in Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina-Faso) and Dengue virus in Kâmpóng Cham (Cambodia), through a trans-disciplinary approach mixing ecology of infectious diseases, public health and health economics to carefully tailor mathematical models able to demonstrate how public health strategies could be improved for these diseases control in these areas and potentially drive the pathogens to local extinction. Such public health tools could be thus extended to other areas of interest and other diseases.