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.

This project focuses on the relationship between the two communities claiming the heritage of St Martin: Marmoutier, the community he himself founded, and St Martin’s which grew around his tomb – a relationship poised between synergy and competition – and on the networks associated with the two communities. The project plans to study the links of these communities (their status could fluctuate between that of a community of canons and a monastery) with one another, with their own dependent communities (St Julian, Cormery, St Cosme and Beaumont) and with the archbishop and the cathedral chapter (St Maurice’s). The links studied will be not only institutional but also those arising from the social, religious and cultural sphere, the topography and the architecture. The communities of Tours allow us a unique opportunity to observe the transformations of western monasticism from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages and their impact at the level of a polycentric microcosm. The research programme is composed of three interconnected lines, which all require the use of a multiplicity of sources and methods of analysis. In the first instance (1), the study of the relations between St Martin’s and Marmoutier, which requires a critical re-examination of the whole body of written material from the Early Middle Ages and of the production of the Tours scriptoria will enable us to reconstruct the separate institutional structure of these two communities during the 10th c. Both created networks of connections with other communities (institutional or based on amicitia). We will study (2) a variety of examples of these connections, notably in terms of architecture, liturgy and diplomacy in order better to understand the social, cultural and liturgical impact of their choices on cenobitic life. Differences between the two communities crystallised around the practices of monastic life, especially during the monastic reform of the 10th c. and the Gregorian Reform of the 11th-12th c. In this context, Marmoutier came to be seen as the Cluny of Western France (3). The study of the monastic buildings provides an opportunity to re-examine the monastic practices of the great Tours community, and the discourse of excellence that the monks of Marmoutier put forward. That is why the project proposes to make an examination of the monastic establishment of Marmoutier in its own right. The project will eventually include several on-line databases and GIS as well as the publication of articles, a critical edition with translation of the narrative sources and a one-volume synthesis, the latter two co-edited. The digitisation of numerous manuscripts will enable the creation of a virtual library of the Tours repositories to be made accessible to scholars and the public. A video will show the architectural evolution of the abbey church at Marmoutier between the 10th and the 12th c., and a CD will be produced to disseminate the liturgical works sung in the monastery at the time.

The publication of medieval charters is an important issue for the European diplomatics since a long time. A great work has been done since the first publications during the 17th century but there still is a great lot of work to be done. Even for the 12th cent. Many archives never have been systematically edited. So, the first stakes of CharCis is to relaunch the edition of medieval charters. From the years 1970’, computer science has been applied to Human Sciences, on which it had a great impact. But, if there are today many databases of charters, in France and in Europe, there is a too big diversity in the making of these databases and of their query interfaces, although data grammars have been developed, like the TEI or the CEI, which is a kind of extension of the former, and although the generalization of the XML-language. So, the second stakes of the CharCis project, is to organize a new and generalized format of databases charters and to create a new query interface, efficient for thematic as for lexical queries, which could become a model adaptable for European diplomatics in its diversity. Some years ago, a new kind of texts publication has been proposed: the idea that it should be possible to publish what should not be a critical edition in the usual meaning of the word, but a first step towards a critical edition. A simple transcription, from one single manuscript, without authenticity critics, without identification of the place and person-names, but published on the net in a database, so that it could be interrogated. The 3rd stakes of the project is the publication of a great lot (about 2,000) of unpublished charters; a simple publication, 1st step towards a critical edition, for giving a first access to the texts. One of the most spectacular movements of the 12th century is the development of the Cistercian order. This Cistercian history seems to be well known, but actually, many parts of this tremendous expansion are only known on a simplifying way. This is because many Cistercian texts are still unpublished, and this is mainly true for the Cistercian charters. So, the 4th stakes of our project is, thanks to the publication of unedited Cistercian charters, to give way to a better knowledge of the Cistercian abbeys, and mainly of the growth of the order and of the uses of literacy among the Cistercian monasteries. Finally, the aim of the project is to create a spur to action on the development of scientific research, and especially on the production of tools in two directions: the production of a system of text edition working following the rules of the CEI/TEI, which actually should be a ready-to-use system for the basis element but thanks to which the researcher could go further; the production of maps tanks to IGS, which localize with a maximal accuracy the historical datas, and give way to an analysis and representation. So the 5th stakes of the project is to create a spur to action for the production of new tools.

The ORIFLAMMS project (Ontology Research, Image Features, Letterform Analysis on Multilingual Medieval Scripts) gathers 3 public research units in Humanities, 3 research units in Engineering, Information Sciences and Technologies and an industrial company in order to enhance our knowledge of the medieval scripts and multilingualism through a new, interdisciplinary approach. Combining scientific, technologic, industrial and societal issues, ORIFLAMMS aims at analyzing the evolution of writing systems and graphical forms during a long period (Middle Ages) and according to their production contexts (informal, documentary, book scripts) and languages (Latin or vernacular). It aims at establishing an ontology of forms and analyzing the graphical structures of scripts and to upgrade a linear, textual approach with a visual, bi- or tridimensional one. This will give new knowledge for linguistics, history of scripts (palaeography, epigraphy, diplomatics) ORIFLAMMS will first gather and harmonize several research corpora, then increase and enhance them, in order to create a new Reference Corpus, covering the diversity of medieval scripts: handwriting to print, informal drafts to monumental inscriptions, from Carolingian times to the eve of Renaissance, from theology and liturgy to chancery rolls and accounts. This Reference Corpus, one of its kind by its wide content, will be of free access, and give access not only to images, but also to graphically analyzed transcriptions (allographetic transcriptions). The text will also be aligned with the image (with coordinates of pixels on the image). All data will be stored in an interoperable XML-TEI file, for long term digital information preservation and access. The Reference Corpus will create a concordance of all written forms in the Middle Ages. For creating this concordance and move to a large-scale Humanities computing project, ORIFLAMMS will develop innovative image analyzing tools: upgrade the aligning methods for image and text and create a computer-aided transcription tool for medieval scripts. This software will be open source and documented. Working with large-scale, rich encoded data and adopting new tools in the research community being an issue, the new software will be developed by the end users (Humanities researchers) in a consortium with a private company to make sure that it can be offered to a larger audience and meet the standards of ergonomic and usability. The innovative tool is not only about producing new encoded data: it is part of their exploitation. ORIFLAMMS plans a new method for the study of scripts: analyzing the graphical variability. The latter will be considered through image analysis on a two-dimensional level, and through computational linguistics for the variability of morphosyntactic and graphical codes in Latin and vernacular. The open source softwares of computational linguistics will be upgraded and documented as part of this project. ORIFLAMMS plans the creation of a Reference Corpus, with images of scripts and transcribed, graphically analyzed texts from representative places and dates of medieval culture, and in interoperable formats. It will create innovative, open source tools for image processing and analysis as well as for statistics and text analysis. It will create new knowledge about the evolution of writing in the multilingual Middle Ages. Il will offer new technologies and approaches for analyzing handwritten texts in a digital context. It will enhance the comprehension of the scribal processes for the anthropologists, pedagogues, neurocognitivists.