Consortium Huma-num Paris-Time Machine – Remonter le temps

Overview

GIS / HGIS Urban Topography Platform for data aggregation or retrieval OA Tools for data enrichment Apps / Interfaces for data visualization

Building geohistorical repositories: The Huma-num Paris Time Machine (PTM) consortium

In the context of the digital humanities, geo-historical repositories put the principles of mutualization and exchanges back at the center of our practices, which must be based on sharing and interoperability. The actions of the PTM Consortium revolve around this notion of geohistorical repository, conceived as a heuristic concept allowing research programs or teams of historians, geographers, archaeologists etc. to develop innovative and shareable practices in the field of space analysis over the long term, based on FAIR and open data principles.

During this first year of the Consortium’s existence, two major sets of worksites have been defined: the “data” worksites and the “tools” worksites. Paris has been – as announced at the outset of the project – a space for experimentation, a sort of archetype, on which we have focused our first projects.

The “data” sites, some of which are still being developed, have made it possible to explore different facets of geohistorical reference systems ranging from urban topography to social and ancient topometry. The “directories and addresses” site, the “Ancient parcels” site, the “Digital models of ancient land” site and the “Seine 1954 site” were some of the typical sites that allowed us to explore the principles and methodologies of constitution of these different facets of geohistorical reference frames. These data are all placed as soon as they are completed under open licenses and available to the research community.
At the same time, the “tools” workshops have enabled us to work on practices and to organize user communities around typical functions that go far beyond the community of Parisian actors. From the geographical approach with the “GEO” project, a so-called transactional webmapping platform, through the database approach with the “Heurist” project, to the semantic web approach with the “Oronce Fine” project, a platform for enhancing collections of digital documents on the web, the challenge for these three platforms was to propose a panel of different operational tools covering the entire need for space-time approaches and potentially deployable within the framework of research programs. Associated with this core, various tools for business processing have been the subject of targeted developments such as the “Amado Online” project started in 2019 and intended to produce an application to visualize cross tables (contingency tables) according to the principles developed by Jacques Bertin in his Sémiologie Graphique or with the “MorphAl” project for Morphological Analysis, a tool for the analysis of vectorial forms.

These tools and the development of associated communities will be the subject of particular attention in the years to come because their development will both meet the functional needs of research programs and encourage communities to move towards greater openness, in accordance with FAIR practices. In this spirit, the interconnection of these three functional platforms, supplemented by a fourth platform, “The Digital Factory of the Past”, which takes the form of a geohistorical data repository tool based on open data principles and backed by the Nakala data warehouse, is one of the challenges of our consortium’s future work, which will enable us to move towards greater “FAIRISATION” of data.

Project partners

With financial support by

TGIR Huma-num

Ministère de l'enseignement supérieur, de la recherche et de l'innovation