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ObARDI: An Introduction

ObARDI is a research project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). It is part of the theme “The Digital Revolution: Relationship to Knowledge and Culture,” which aims at supporting interdisciplinary research initiatives relating to the social and digital sciences.

The objective of ObARDI is to improve our understanding of the power dynamics that underlie the construction of the modern State in France. By analyzing the mechanisms of its development and the representations of its political territory, we aim at overcoming the metanarrative of the construction of the State (Blockmans et Genet, 1995; Blockmans et al., 2009). Indeed, despite an illusory resemblance in vocabulary, categories of the State and of the civil society that are natural to us were undoubtedly alien to contemporaries three centuries ago. Moreover, our cognitive representations of what constitutes a political territory remain bounded by geographic categories that only emerged progressively throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

To tackle these challenges, we develop a knowledge representation system of institutional dynamics of Ancien Régime France based on the representation and organization of historical information through computer ontologies—hence the name of the project: an Ontology-based Ancien Régime Data Infrastructure (ObARDI). The construction of this infrastructure proceeds in four steps:

  • The first step consists in the construction of a large database describing the local institutional, economic, and social environment of seventeenth and nineteenth century France. These data provide the basis of an interoperable matrix for Ancien Régime history.
  • In a second step, these data are integrated into an information system structured by formal ontologies, which describes the relationship between the entities of the database as well as its underlying historical sources.
  • The third step, which proceeds in parallel to the first two, renders the infrastructure compliant with FAIR data management principles in the perspective of linked open data; the infrastructure is interoperable, accessible through an ergonomic web platform, and constitutes a tool to enhance the use of the digital humanities by different publics.
  • Finally, this environment creates new mapping tools to better represent Ancien Régime territories and their dynamics from the point of view of contemporaries. This aspect of our project represents Ancien Régime territories as an unstable set of overlapping institutional layers which frontiers are structured by the internal power relationships in their midst.

A Matrix for Ancien Régime History

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the unprecedented development of large collective projects in quantitative history. Their ambition was to create databases from historical sources to interrogate the concept of the longue durée (Furet, 1971). However, these efforts were soon met with skepticism and disillusionment along with the cultural turn in history during the 1980s (Béaur, 1996, Lemercier and Zalc, 2019), thereby putting an end to the predominance of this type of historical research. Successive generations of computer formats made it difficult to maintain most of these databases; as a result, they oftentimes remain inaccessible to researchers.

Gérard Béaur, “Séries économiques françaises (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)” [compte-rendu], Annales ESC, p. 1137-1184, based on Jacques-Yves Grenier (1985). [Online], n°5 | 1989

In the current landscape of revival of quantification in historical research (Ruggles, 2021), ObARDI aims at putting together the stock knowledge accumulated in the past fifteen years by some of these large projects and to make them accessible in a sustainable and structured manner. This will enable the creation of new sources of knowledge by building on and digitizing a wide array of historical sources. By learning from the mistakes of the past, our infrastructure is designed as a matrix capable of incorporating data collected by other researchers and projects in the future.

Fonds Jean Nicolas, All Rights Reserved Bibliothèque François Lebrun, Université Rennes 2

Our matrix for Ancien Régime history is composed of four panels:

  • An institutional panel,
  • A demographic panel,
  • An infrastructure panel,
  • A social movement panel.

To enable interoperability and comparisons across these panels, a common frame of reference is constituted by the fiscal parishes of 1789. Most of these parishes were later erected into municipalities in the 1790s, then into communes starting in 1800. Of course, this underlying frame is not entirely compatible with the various historical sources we use; nevertheless, our ontologies will enable us to match these sources to our frame and make the juncture between Ancien Régime parishes and post-Revolutionary communes.

Ontologies and Historical Data

The second objective of ObARDI is to integrate heterogeneous historical data into a fully structured information system. For the past twenty years, historians have struggled with the semantic heterogeneity of concepts and vocabularies used to classify, name, and interpret historical entities. Ontologies and controlled vocabularies have been one of the tools envisioned to deal with these challenges, such as the CIDOC-CRM ontology for cultural heritage.

Related to our project, the LARHRA has recently developed symogih.org, a generic ontology dedicated to structuring historical data that takes into account various aspects of the historical methodology (Beretta, 2017). Besides the reuse of various elements of symogih.org, ObARDI will also develop several ontologies aligned with existing ones such as TSN (territorial statistical nomenclature) and TSN-Change (Bernard et al. 2018) for geography, Records in Contexts (RiC) for historical sources, or Micropublications (Clark et al. 2014) for source criticism.

These ontologies will enable to describe the three important aspects: institutions and its actors, the geography and temporality of its base units—including their links with institutions–, and the sources that underly the information extracted in this context.

FAIR Research Practices

To cope with the replication crisis, which now has reached the social sciences, we would like to place ObARDI at the heart of the open science movement and implement practices compliant with FAIR data management principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). A short description of these practices can be found in our Data Management Plan.

To make the data of our infrastructure accessible, interoperable, and reusable, the choice of the repository in which our data will be deposited is crucial, as many aspects will be managed by this repository. The current landscape of data repositories is evolving rapidly, with many possibilities such as Dataverse, Figshare, or Zenodo. Moreover, the committee for open science (CoSO) is currently developing a generic service for hosting and disseminating data at the national level. A priori, we will however deposit the data on the long-term repository PROGEDO-ADISP, partner in this project via the MSHS-T. Indeed, PROGEDO will soon receive the Core Trust Seal certification, thereby ensuring that various criteria compliant with FAIR data management practices are met.

We will further enable access to our data through an open license of the type CC BY 4.0. All the data will be accessible via a web platform, which construction will require a series of reflections about digital mediation practices in order to appeal to historians as well as economists and computer scientists (Liquète, 2015). In this spirit, we will write a series of data papers to describe our data, as part of a new form of dissemination of research data.

Finally, this Hypotheses blog is at the heart of our mediation and dissemination efforts toward our respective scientific communities. Labelled “ObARDI’s Workshop,” it is in line with the tradition of a decentered scientific conversation. Far from an institutional display of the project, it intends to document our reflexive process and to produce articles regularly in order to discuss our progress and debate on ideas about the concrete applications to the digital humanities—but also our failures.

One Project, Some Projects

To conclude this short presentation, we would like to mention various projects similar to ours. For instance, ANR Communes aims at mapping the limits of the 41,000 communes of metropolitan France that ever existed since 1790. It also aims at constructing the network of roads, railroads, and waterways of France from 1700 to 2020. Moreover, the Cassini project develops a geohistorical referential for metropolitan France over the post-Revolutionary period—a presentation of these two projects is available here. Finally, the HISCoD (Historical Social Conflict Database) uses the Jean Nicolas funds in a comparative perspective. We hope that synergies will emerge between these projects in the perspective of open science.

References

Béaur, Gérard. 1996. “Âge critique ou âge de raison ? Les dix ans d’Histoire & Mesure.” Histoire & Mesure, 1996 volume 11 – n°1-2. Varia.

Beretta, Francesco. 2017. “L’interopérabilité des données historiques et la question du modèle : l’ontologie du projet SyMoGIH.” Brigitte Juanals and Jean-Luc Minel. Enjeux numériques pour les médiations scientifiques et culturelles du passé, Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre.

Bernard, Camille, Marlène Villanova-Olivier, Jérôme Gensel, and Hy Dao. 2019. “Modeling Changes in Territorial Partitions Over Time: Ontologies TSN and TSN-Change.” SAC ’18, 866–875.

Blockmans, Wim and Jean-Philippe Genet, eds. 1995. The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th to 18th Centuries. 7 vol. Strasbourg/Oxford : European Science Foundation / Clarendon Press.

Blockmans, Wim, André Holenstein, Jon Mathieu and Daniel Schläppi, eds. 2009. Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300-1900. Farnham/Burlington : Ashgate.

Clark, Tim, Paolo N. Ciccarese, and Carole A. Goble. 2014. “Micropublications: A Semantic Model for Claims, Evidence, Arguments and Annotations in Biomedical Communications.” Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 5(1).

Furet, François. 1971. “L’histoire Quantitative et Construction Du Fait Historique”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 26 (1). Cambridge University Press : 63-75.

Lemercier, Claire and Claire Zalc. 2019. “Quantitative History from Peak to Crisis” in Quantitative Methods in the Humanities: An Introduction. Charlottesville/London : University of Virginia Press.

Liquète, Vincent. 2015. “L’Accessibilité Web comme Porte et Enjeu de Médiation des Savoirs.” Distances et Médiations des Savoirs, 12.

Ruggles, Steven. 2021. “The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories.” Social Science History 45 (1), 1-25.

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data, 3, 1–9.



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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Sébastien Poublanc et Victor Gay (2 décembre 2021). ObARDI: An Introduction. ObARDI's Workshop. Consulté le 25 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://obardieng.hypotheses.org/20


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