Research Engineer in Digital Humanities

The GPR ‘Human Past’: our group and our research

The GPR (Grand Programme de Recherche) ‘Human Past’ is an interdisciplinary research project supported by the University of Bordeaux's Initiative d’Excellence. ‘Human Past’ gathers ~110 researchers from 3 laboratories (PACEA, AUSONIUS, and Archéosciences Bordeaux) affiliated with the University of Bordeaux (UB) and the University of Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM). Our expertise combines biological anthropology, Classical and Medieval Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory, History, Epigraphy, Archaeometry, Geochronology and Computer Science Applications to Cultural Heritage

’Human Past’ aims to document, characterize and understand the tipping points that have induced major biological and cultural changes within past human populations. Spanning a large chronological period (from Prehistory to historical times), our research aims to identify the quantum leaps that enabled a primate originally adapted to African ecosystems to evolve into a species that occupies and impacts every ecosystem on the planet. Biological and social systems will be scrutinized at different scales from a multitude of perspectives with particular attention paid to phenotypic and genetic variability, cognition, technology, social organization, belief systems, and genetic and cultural anticipatory strategies that drive human societies.

                This position advertisement belongs to the first part of the funding scheme, planned for 4 years.

Project description

The general objective of the project is to design and implement an interface, suitable for use by the entire scientific community, allowing the publication of digital critical editions of ancient texts. The specific objective is to test the feasibility of this approach by producing a digital critical edition of the Latin historian Granius Licinianus (2nd century AD). The surviving fragments, dating from 163-78 BC, were preserved in a manuscript that was discovered in 1853 and survives as a double palimpsest. Since the editio princeps (1857), the text has been the subject of several attempts of conjectural additions. A digital edition will propose a text closest to the original and will make explicit the process leading to it. It will be able to take advantage of a new reading of the manuscript, kept at the British Library, London, thanks to multispectral imaging, in order to decipher the lower text of the palimpsest. The work will provide a commentary that takes into account historical interpretations and uses (national, regional, institutional...) to which this text has given rise.

The research engineer's main tasks will be to

- gather the elements constituting the philological and historical exploitation of Granius Licinianus since 1853

- prepare them for their integration in the digital commented edition.

- contribute with the other members of the action (philologists and computer engineers) to the creation of the digital edition

- contribute to the development and promotion of the interface allowing the digital edition targeted to the French and international community

Adequacy of the project with the objectives of the GRP

The research tehcnician’s task is in line with the objectives of the GPR "Human Past", in the framework of Action 3 ('Digital Critical Editions: a new challenge for the conservation and interpretation of ancient texts') of WP5 ("How can the study of cultural heritage improve our knowledge of the human past while at thesame time promoting its protection and strengthen societal and community development?). Printing has led to the habit of considering ancient texts (literary or technical) as fixed bodies, making their erratic evolution over the centuries invisible. By designing and implementing a visualization interface for the critical editions chosen and prepared by the team, the aim is to develop a new relationship between the general public and the Greco-Roman textual heritage by allowing easy access to the ancient texts "long term" history. In the feasability study at hand, the challenge will be to reconstruct and visualize a 180-year evolution of knowledge from the editio princeps, taking advantage of the tools of philology and those of multispectral imaging. There are clear epistemic, cognitive and pedagogical benefits behind this project.

Principal supervisors:

Olivier Devillers, Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University Bordeaux Montaigne, olivier.devillers@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr, UMR 5607 Ausonius

Nathalie Prévôt, CNRS Research Assistant in Digital Humanities, nathalie.prevot@cnrs.fr, UMR 5607 Ausonius

Contract duration : 12 months, renewable one time