Poetry around 1500, among the Rhétoriqueurs of France, is characterized by various kinds of hybridizations of genres (chronicle/epic, propaganda or moral lesson/lyricism, official discourse/familiar epistolarity, brief poetic genres/narration, etc.). Our premise is that these crossings reflect a confrontation between a still-vibrant French poetic tradition and the new literary resources that characterize the Renaissance (discoveries and critical editions of ancient authors, diffusion of Italian poetry). The Rhétoriqueurs of France discovered Italian culture and their claim to a “Renaissance” of the arts at the time of the Italian wars: they were confronted with a rich and attractive literary revival, but it was embodied by the enemy. The hybridizations of different poetic genres reveal a real stance towards this Renaissance: one of critical appropriation, refusing to simply replace the French poetic tradition, as the Pléiade poets would later do. The project therefore aims to change the way French literary history around 1500 is represented, by providing the means to replace the teleological narrative of a period of “Middle Ages” followed by a “Renaissance”, which has prevailed for a long time. The project is based on two work packages. The first one aims to explore and edit a vast unpublished corpus, that of Guillaume Cretin’s Chronique française, a historical account of the French monarchy that borrows epic structures. The second, which builds on the reading hypotheses and method developed for the edition and study of the Chronique, consists of a literary history study of genre hybridizations among the Rhétoriqueurs of France (Robertet, Saint-Gelais, La Vigne, Auton, Marot, Picart, Lemaire, Cretin).

On the 772 Latin authors, of which we kept the memory, 276 are only names; for 352 of them we possess only fragments and only the 144 which remain preserved one or several works. Yet, despite the importance of the fragments for our full understanding of Latin literature and culture, fragmentary literature is still a terra incognita. In the field of fragmentary Latin literature, research has largely taken the path of ecdotics and paper editions. However, this approach often proves unsatisfactory, because it hardly highlights the process of citation of the fragments and relies on the arbritrary reconstruction of a text whose veracity is unverifiable. The FragmAnt project (Ancient Fragments: citation and reception of early fragmentary Latin literature) aims to study the citation and reception of republican fragmentary Latin literature through the analysis and study of the contexts in which the fragments are cited and the provision to the scientific community of a digital critical edition of the fragments. It is hypothesized that the digital tool will compensate for the shortcomings of paper editions and that the collection and digital processing of fragments and their citation contexts will allow for a better understanding of the reception of these authors and their works in antiquity, the networks of reception and citation, and finally the modalities of citation among the Latins.

IThAC aims at the study of the reception of Ancient Drama in XVIth c. Europe through the analysis of the scholarly printed paratexts of its editions, and at the diffusion of the French translation of this corpus thnaks to a dynamic website. Our hypothesis is that the gathering, translation and analysis of this corpus, which has been neglected for a long time because it was hard to find and composed in Latin, if not in Greek, will enable researchers to grasp how Ancient Drama has been first received and understood by its « inventors ». It will also help investigate how the ideas and methods at work in thoses paratexts circulated and evolved, thanks to their large diffusion made possible by printing, in the very context of the invention of modern drama and modern philology. Those paratexts, which were most of the time written by major scholars of the time, have had a wide audience and circulated much more than those written in vernacular, because Latin was then the language by scholars to communicate : by neglecting them, one omits a major stage of the intellectual debates on drama, philology and the reception of Antiquity ; by taking them into account, IThAC will help reconstructing this debates. Though there has been studies on the reception of some Ancient dramatists, and on some paratexts to their editions, this corpus has not yet been studied as a whole. IThAC, by gathering together philologists, historians of Drama, specialists of Greek, Latin and neo-Latin Drama, will study this important corpus by translating it and developing digital tools to explore it systematically. This will enable researchers to spot the major concepts used and build by the scholars and to visualise their chronology, the evolution of the nomber of editions by poet, genre, language, country ; to map places of print, nets of humanists and to highlight their collaborations. Thanks to this interdisciplinary approach of the genesis, the transformation, the evolution and the circulation of the ideas on Ancien Drama in XVIth c. Europe, IThAC will allow a new insight on the Reception of Ancient Drama, the birth of Modern Drama and more broadly on scholarship in XVIth c. Europe. It will also give access to an unknown european heritage.

The aim of BASNUM is to digitize the Dictionnaire universel (DU) by Antoine Furetière, in the 1701 version rewritten by Basnage de Beauval, and to analyse it with digital methods, in order to better assess the importance of this work for the evolution of sciences and mentalities in the 18th century, and to contribute to the contemporary movement for creating innovative and data-driven computational methods for text digitization, encoding and analysis. To date, no study has endeavoured to evaluate and to understand the extent of the transformations and additions brought by the émigré French lawyer to the initial work by Antoine Furetière. However, between 1690 and 1701 the dictionary triples in volume and undergoes important qualitative changes. The working hypothesis is that, unlike both Furetière and the members of Compagnie de Jésus involved in the conception of Trévoux (1704), Basnage approaches dictionary writing much more as a scientist. As a result, he produces an encyclopaedic and descriptive work, operating also as a form of learner’s dictionary. Beyond the understanding of the lexicographic method of Basnage, the project intends to explore the linguistic vision within which the DU is built. It will raise the question about how the sociological and religious identity of the author affected his work. In this regard, dictionary writing may be seen not only as an encyclopaedic enterprise, but also as a means to maintain the link with France, for himself and moreover for a community keen on preserving its identity in spite of being severed from its motherland. The project sets to test these hypotheses and to answer these questions through a systematic, i. e. computer assisted, reading of the text. First, this involves the preparation of the text in an XML/TEI compliant format. In addition to manual encoding, the project will use advanced techniques for semi-structured text acquisition, adapting the scholarly paper parser GROBID to the digitization of a historical dictionary. Second, once the source digitized and further corrected and marked-up, it will be compared, using digital tools, to precedent and subsequent dictionaries, so as to evaluate Basnage’s contribution. Third, a series of queries will be conducted in order to extract all available information about scientific domains and branches of arts and crafts, as seen by Basnage, as well as about his auctorial stance. Fourth, the lexicographic corpus of the 1701 DU and Basnage’s scientific network will be, at least partially, identified, both through manual identification of authors quoted in the text, and through the use of the named entity tool NERD, freely available via HUMA-NUM. To sum up, the project is original and relevant insofar as it will: • create a digital publication of an important heritage dictionary, compliant with the most advanced standards of scholarly digital editions, under an open-access licence; • allow to better evaluate Basnage’s contribution to the advancement of the lexicography, and his role in the “republic of letters” at the beginning of the 18th century; • open the way to a digital analysis of the “corpus” underlying the dictionary by exploring the knowledge networks and cited sources that can themselves be mined and analysed digitally; • push further the automatizing of text capture and basic annotation of semi-structured documents; • contribute to the establishment of best practices in annotating semantic and bio-bibliographic information in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and linking such information to other internet resources; • help refining methods and techniques for building linguistic and historical knowledge from digitized sources and material, and through using digital tools.

The CORR-PROUST 1907-1914 project aims to reconstruct the online archive of Marcel Proust’s creative process. A digital, revised and augmented edition of Proust’s letters during his most inventive period (1907-1914), connected to the digital archive of his manuscripts as well as to cultural and media archives of his era, will allow explorations of the multiple aspects of his creative work. From his return to fiction-writing through a series of articles published in 1907, through the flourishing of his projects for essays and novels in 1908, to his earliest sketches for a narrative that had yet to find a shape, the reclusive novelist had to write letters in order to consult colleagues and acquaintances, to test ideas and phrases, to seek advice from trusted friends at various moments of the composition of his novel, and (since he rarely left his bed) to seek out information to document his work; around the publication of the first volume in late 1913, it was also through his letters that he arranged collaborations to manage the editorial process and oversee the novel’s reception in the press. Working from the revised, augmented and annotated epistolary corpus of this creative period, the CORR-PROUST 1907-1914 project aims to produce richly encoded data that will enable researchers, through quantitative and qualitative search capabilities, to analyze the roles of various correspondents and the styles of their epistolary relations, to identify literary citations and borrowings from various textual sources, or to assess the impact of political and cultural events on Proust’s thought and writings. By shedding light on the emergence of a literary masterpiece through a variety of documents, linked through annotation and made searchable through encoding, the project will contribute to the diffusion of archives related to literary creation and to the future of digital humanities.