At the crossroads of interconnected history, of cultural transfers and of material culture, the scheme Exogenesis proposes to establish the concept of "boundary objects" as objects born to exogenesis, that is to say, the contact with materials, techniques, shapes, skills, or items coming from the antipodes. Since the 16th century, from which era the cognizance of four separate continents has been entrenched, such objects have also been done to perpetuate the link binding Us to the Others (Todorov T., 1989). If the focus on the history of objects is commonplace in the historiography of art, the approach using the most recent anthropological methods relative to objects, conceived as concentrators of meaning, and applying those methods to the study of Europe understood as a meeting ground, is relatively novel. Indeed, using this approach, the focus on "boundary objects" will translate into the analysis of metabolic phenomena. More precisely, studying the usage of “boundary objects” permits to address the history of the construction of the European identity through dialogue with the Others. In such a way, the history of art will itself be driven towards its boundaries. The object as a conveyor is still insufficiently studied as such in the interconnected history of economics, politics or sociology, although it is at times found as an ingredient of historical or artistic speech. A fortiori, the object engendered by a match with an extra-European item has rarely been a point of focus. The scheme proposes to bare remedy to this by pointing to the precise moment when the "exogenous" makes the "endogenous". The making of the meaning of objects by the surrounding context as well as the intrinsic ambivalence of objects (Jeudy-Ballini M.-B. Derlon 2008) are key issues of the scheme. Whatever the surrounding context, nature or provenance, the various terms of production of “boundary objects” will be analysed. "The boundary object" will be regarded as a hub of complex relations which will be analysed from a nexus of selected cases. A paradigmatic "boundary object", the nautilus of the South Pacific Seas mounted by German silversmiths in the late sixteenth century, has been recently described as a "relic holder of a new type” (du Crest S., 2009). Around these particularly meaningful "boundary objects", the status of objects can be addressed effectively so as to further lead the history of art into a more thorough understanding of all its objects. These objects manufactured in Europe, born in the European consciousness, can be understood only in the European context. They do not amount to interbreeding since they have been founders of a European identity they still help build. Taste, imitation, stimulation, hybridisation are essential ingredients of the process of acculturation (Labrusse R., 2011). Based on the analysis of the contextualization, the project proposes to follow the reasons and issues of the production of the « boundary objects » in which the track of their originary exogenesis is still visible. Following this process in the design and making, "boundary objects" have become, and still are, objects of Europe. The relation to the Other, with an interplay of fascination and repulsion, is now made conspicuous by these objects. This process of acculturation generates such "boundary objects" with their shapes. Exogenesis proposes to elicit the related causes and consequences.

The RCF project (CFR in English, cfregisters.org) is dedicated to affording prominence to the exceptional documents stored at the Comédie-Française archives: accounts of box office takings, expenditures and audience numbers; fees paid to staff. The first phase of the project (RCF1) consisted in digitizing all these documents, and developing an online database that enables the box office takings dating from 1680 to 1793 to be seen on screen. Now, the second phase (RCF2) will adapt this model to the accounts of expenditure from the same period, which will provide a wealth of information, particularly on staging (scenery, costumes, music and stage properties). The project will also link these two databases to each other and to other existing projects (interoperability plan). By networking these two databases with each other and with other existing projects (interoperability), and by organising events, publishing documents, staging educational programmes, and producing long-forgotten plays from the repertoire,RCF2 will develop further the cultural and encyclopedic knowledge that RCF1 put in place. The main aim of the project is to foreground French theatrical heritage by means of the most innovative technologies, which will permit statistical processing, and will enable archival documents to physically to be seen on screen. The heritage will also be foregrounded via publications, events, and stagings of the theatrical repertory from the past. Technical Aims: 1. Undertake the entry of data of digitized documents using specialized software and procedures; 2. Create a software interface that will make accessible the entirety of the RCF’s data and metadata (box office takings, expenditures, fees to actors, theatre reviews, attendance registers); 3. Create innovative high-performance visualisation tools that will link the entirety of information contained in our databases; 4. Guarantee the longevity and the accessibility of the RCF’s resources (the digitized documents are already open-access; 5. Guarantee transparent sharing of information between the different international teams involved in the project (MIT, UVIC, RCF France). Research Aims: 1. Analyse the data contained in the Comédie-Française’s daily spending accounts for the period 1680-1776; 2. Create innovative ways with which to disseminate the project’s content knowledge and will promote the cultural history explored by the project (multimedia, wiki-style dictionary, interactive and collaborative online publications, mobile apps); 3. Prioritize interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences by enabling a transdisciplinary dialogue between academic specialists (computer science, history, literature, economics, history of the arts, theatre studies) and professional and cultural industries (information technology specialists and archivists); 4. Enrich, enhance and modernize research methods in the Social Sciences via the implementation of a research tool that is at once ambitious and collaborative, and simple to use (a data archive that is dynamic, and accessible for researchers across the world); Pedagogical Aims : 1. Contribute towards the training of secondary school pupils and university students in the digital humanities; 2. Update research and training methods in the Social Sciences via international co-teaching initiatives (workshops that foreground student mobility and adaptability). Cultural Aims : 1. Enable dialogue between the areas of academic research and the culture industries, via conferences that will propose a broad reflection on questions of contemporary relevance such as the history of institutions, the relationship between the State and culture, the social role of culture, the functioning of theatre economy, audience reception, the status of actors and authors, and theatre aesthetics; 2. Conduct creative artistic experimentation in order to rediscover the repertoire, which has for the most part been forgotten and has not been played since the 18th century.

The numerical accumulation of data on the screen evokes the ambitions of the Ptolemies, as well as those of the great encyclopedic projects. But it also prompts questions about the nature of knowledge that define human civilization itself. (cf. Milad Douehi, 2008) In this sense, the digital humanities pose new technological challenges. How does one efficiently constitute and interpret these massive databases in ways that are meaningful? The RCF Project will focus on an exceptionally rich dataset: the handwritten daily receipt registers of the Comédie-Française (CF), a major part of the theatrical patrimony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. The CF is actually the only theater in the world to have saved its administrative records from this period. Its archives represent a unique and precious resource, but they are difficult to exploit in their current state. Access to these manuscripts, preserved by the troupe in the Palais Royal in Paris, is limited, and the sheer mass of information they contain poses quantitative and qualitative methodological problems. New digital technologies, however, can overcome these limitations, offering both new modes of conservation and new forms of public access to the material. Our primary goals are the digitalization, the statistical analysis, and the interpretation of the data contained in the daily registers of the troupe for the 1680-1793 period. The RCF Project will work towards these objectives by means of the most advanced database and visualization technologies. Specifically, it has two components: • An IT aspect that will include the online reconstitution of digital facsimiles of the registers, and the development of innovative online tools for visualization and statistical analysis that will result in the creation of an interactive online database available to all users free of charge; • A set of scholarly research initiatives, based on the exploitation of the online facsimiles and database, that will result in a series of conferences, publications, and teaching initiatives. Thanks to the CF’s desire to offer greater access to these materials, and to the possibilities inherent in today’s digital technologies, this project will enlarge and accelerate the study and diffusion of knowledge in the field of theater history. Those of us working on the RCF Project see it as part of efforts throughout the academy to provide greater accessibility to cutting-edge scholarship, thereby creating large-scale communities of scholars and students working in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This initiative is the result of an international collaboration between the HAR 414 research team (“The History of the Arts and of Representation”) at the Université Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense; the MIT Department of History and “HyperStudio,” MIT’s Digital Humanities Laboratory; the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française; Harvard University’s Humanities Center and the Harvard Department of Romance Languages and Litteratures; the research team CELFF/17-18 (Paris IV-Sorbonne); and the FoReLL team (Université de Poitiers). The international dimension of this project (France-United States) represents a convergence of expertise between technological, cultural, patrimonial and educational institutions.

Melponum (Melpomene in the Digital Age) is a project which intends to expand the reception and analysis of Renaissance theatrical works. Although, for a hundred years, editions and critical works on these plays have multiplied, they are still less studied than 17th-century dramas, and they remain absent from school curricula (the high school drama curricula can only cover the period from the 17th to the 21st century) and from the theatrical scene. Hence, our project intends to bring together people from the fields of research, education and the performing arts to expand the reception of comedies and tragedies printed between 1530 and 1604 (from the first plays by Marguerite de Navarre to Montchrestien’s last play) and then develop knowledge about these plays. With this in mind, we produce scholarly digital editions, based on the XML-TEI language, and presenting an innovative form. Indeed, to reach out to the three targeted audiences, we have conceived customizable editions, leaving the choice to the user between three different versions of the text (to be viewed on the platform and/or printed in different formats): a research version, a teaching version, and a theatrical rehearsal version. The research version will present a non-modernized text, a complete critical and scientific apparatus, a classic visualization; the teaching version will present a modernized text, a lighter scientific apparatus, educational resources (ready-to-use texts, links to school curricula and other resources), but also a dynamic and more playful visualization to allow study in class on the platform ; finally, the rehearsal version will also present a modernized text and a lightened critical apparatus (focused on dramaturgical notations) and will be characterized by a more spaced out layout, so that the actors can take notes. The editions also mix textual, iconographic, and video content, and intend to reference existing resources on these plays (sitographies, bibliographies). The editions will be enriched with all the content produced during the development of the project: the recordings of readings and performances are meant to provide new material for research, as will be the case for the reports on educational experiments. Finally, users will be able to report resources, links of all kinds, ongoing projects, even intertexts directly on the platform, in a citizen science framework. All such data will be published in accordance with FAIR principles. This publishing work, carried out jointly by researchers, teachers, and directors, will be accompanied by a program of scientific and cultural mediation. We are setting up two major symposiums accompanied with theatrical shows in Metz and Strasbourg, three cycles of scientific workshops associated with readings by actors in Metz and Strasbourg, three cycles of general public conferences in Metz associated with readings or shows, as well as theatrical workshops, interventions in class, or educational experiments: for those events, we always associate researchers with actors and/or teachers. Our hypothesis is in fact that the collaboration of researchers with different social actors will make it possible to set up effective tools to give these texts their rightful place in the French literary heritage. Thus, the project will make it possible to reinstate an unknown side of the French dramas to researchers and the public, which will promote the emergence of new critical works, new educational resources, and new shows on this corpus. This project is rooted in an interdisciplinary perspective and its methodology is based on the idea of open science.

Why does the impact of American theatre on French stages remain limited, in spite of the US’s booming performing arts industry, and leading influence in other fields? The project ACTiF (American Contemporary Theater in France) aims to investigate this unexplored paradox, thus filling a gap in performance studies as well as international cultural policy studies, and building bridges between ongoing research on French and US theatre cultures. The importation of US theater in France is the result of a selection process whose context, logics and subjectivity must be studied to account for its relative scarcity. ACTiF’s first objective is to circumscribe the episteme of the cultural transfer mechanisms, specifying the various aesthetic, political and diplomatic stakes involved in the circulation of US plays in France from the 1960s to the 2020s. Its second objective is to contribute to the development of tools useful to both academic and artistic communities and general audiences alike, to galvanize French research on transatlantic cultural exchanges, and heighten the visibility of US theater. To reach these goals, ACTiF adopts the conceptual and practical method of action-research bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines and theater practitioners (artists and cultural workers).