ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH

By Aurélia Chossegros

As previously for M.A.V.I. or Achemenet, our new Website under Focus (Site à la loupe) is plural. This time it is only one website, NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), whose realizations and applications are so varied and so rich that every each one of them could prompt a specific article. As for the Achaemenid World, a same will and vision is behind this realization, Jerome McGann’s, John Stewart Bryan Professor Of English at the University of Virginia. All the productions of this website, Collex, Ivanhoe or Juxta, are disciplinary and practically complementary and meet a common philosophy and logic, which dooms any separate analysis.

The real innovation of this structure and of its productions lies in its capacity to line up the complicated needs of Humanities’ scholars and the specificities of the digital medium and of the network’s realizations. A common reflection about the scholar’s work space and the possibilities of expansion and connection offered by the new medium underlies the three tools conceived by the Nines’ teams. In the long run, every each one of these tools will enable their users - under different terms - to create their own personal evolutionary work space offering a wide range of productions (exhibitions with Collex, interpretative games with Ivanhoe or collations with Juxta ; resources corpuses for all three tools) and to display the other users’ space. Moreover, the fact that all three tools have individual blogs [1] not only complies with the necessities of distance collaboration but also enables a constructive exchange between the members of the Nines networked community (editorial teams, laboratories, users...). Indeed, the tools’ users are actively involved in all the tools and softwares’ elaboration stages, from the theoretical conception, during their construction, and, once they are published online, in maintaining them and making them evolve.

All NINES members share a common vision of a collaborative and creative scholarly network, producing high-standard digital resources, freely and easily accessible on the World Wide Web. All Nines productions are generalizable and can be applied to other areas of research in digital scholarship. Ivanhoe and Collex are both placed under an Educational Community License and all Nines tools are developed and released in an Open Source form. This sharing and opening policy drives the NINES mission which aims to form a triple model for future digital realizations in the Humanities : an institutional and structural model for online scholarship and digital edition ; a software development model for digital scholarly productions ; and, finally, a sustainable economic model for online scholarship. Furthermore, the ambition of Nines and its founder is to demonstrate to a scholarly community too often sceptical the utility and the richness of the digital medium and its applications for teaching and research in the Humanities, even in its ludic or creative characteristics. The Observatoire Critique can only recognize itself in this ambition.


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[1] Collex blog : http://patacriticism.org/collex/
Ivanhoe blog : http://patacriticism.org/ivanhoe/
Juxta blog : http://patacriticism.org/juxta/