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: