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International audience; transHumUs is an artistic work recently exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale. The work aims at freeing trees from their roots. How to translate this poetic ambition into technological terms? This paper reports on the setup and the implementation of the project. It shows how state of the art mobile robotics technology can contribute to contemporary art development. The challenge has been to design original mobile platforms carrying charges of three tones, while moving noiseless according to tree metabolism, in operational spaces populated by visitors.

V International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2013); International audience; The paper presents the early stage of the CRISTAL project, an original French project involving linguists, computer researchers and a firm specializing in multilingual text management. What is at stake from a linguistic point of view is a deeper analysis of the notion of Knowledge Rich Context proposed by Meyer (2001). Using comparable corpora, it analyzes how the notion of KRC can vary according to text genre and/or type of users.

France’s hesitant stance on EU enlargement towards the Balkans is illustrative of a broader ambivalence among both French elites and citizens towards the European project. Despite principled support for the Balkans’ EU membership, achieving this step is no strategic priority for France. The official approach emphasizes strict conditionality and a rigorous monitoring of reform progress in aspirant countries. A hostile public opinion and superficial media coverage further strengthen the country’s reluctance to admit new, possibly unprepared candidates into the Union. Analysing the historical evolution of the French position on EU enlargement as well as its current political, institutional and societal expressions, this article construes France’s disinvestment from the Balkans’ EU perspective as the result of failed expectations and a growing disillusionment with the EU’s international role and its political future more broadly. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 17 (4)

International audience; This essay examines the geographic origins, the political belongings and the confessional profiles of the members of the two most important mercantile nations of eighteenth-century southern Italy: the French nation and the British factory of Naples. Taking into account their pronounced prosopographic heterogeneity, it shows how legal resources and their social uses played a crucial role in defining the boundaries of such groups.

International audience; Synchrotrons have provided significant methods and instruments to study ancient materials from cultural and natural heritages. New ways to visualise (surfacic or volumic) morphologies are developed on the basis of elemental, density and refraction contrasts. They now apply to a wide range of materials, from historic artefacts to paleontological specimens. The tunability of synchrotron beams owing to the high flux and high spectral resolution of photon sources is at the origin of the main chemical speciation capabilities of synchrotron-based techniques. Although, until recently, photon-based speciation was mainly applicable to inorganic materials, novel developments based, for instance, on STXM and deep UV photoluminescence bring new opportunities to study speciation in organic and hybrid materials, such as soaps and organometallics, at a submicrometric spatial resolution over large fields of view. Structural methods are also continuously improved and increasingly applied to hierarchically structured materials for which organisation results either from biological or manufacturing processes. High-definition (spectral) imaging appears as the main driving force of the current trend for new synchrotron techniques for research on cultural and natural heritage materials.

International audience; We here describe the Rhapsodie resource, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French, composed of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and 33000 words), and an orthographic transcription. The transcription and the annotations are all aligned on the speech signal : phonemes, syllables, words, speakers, overlaps. The main objective of the Rhapsodie project is to define rich, explicit, and reproducible schemes for the annotation of prosody and syntax in different genres (± spontaneous, ± planned, face-to-face interviews vs. broadcast, etc.), in order to study the prosody/syntax/discourse interface in spoken French, and their roles in the segmentation of speech into discourse units. This resource is freely available at www.projet-rhapsodie.fr. The sound samples (wav/mp3), the acoustic analysis (original F0 curve manually corrected and automatic stylized F0, pitch format), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations (xml, textgrid), and the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France. The metadata are encoded in the IMDI-CMFI format and can be parsed on line.

The pigment Prussian blue is studied in heritage science because of its capricious fading behavior under light exposure. We show here that XANES can be used to study the photosensitivity of Prussian blue heritage materials despite X-ray radiation damage. We used an original approach based on X-ray photochemistry to investigate in depth the redox process of Prussian blue when it is associated with a cellulosic substrate, as in cyanotypes and watercolors. By modifying cation and proton contents of the paper substrate, we could tune both rate and extent of Prussian blue reduction. These results demonstrate that the photoreduction and fading of Prussian blue is principally mediated by the substrate and its interaction with the oxygen of the environment.

In Paleolithic settlement models for Africa, West Africa has been neglected, if not entirely ignored, due to an obvious lack of research in the region but also of the availability of reliable and precise chronostratigraphic data. However, since 1997 research conducted at Ounjougou (Mali) has significantly updated our view of the West African Middle Stone Age with the establishment of the first archaeological and chronostratigraphic sequence and use of a comprehensive geomorphological approach. This site complex has provided most of the data for MIS 5 to 3, but in order to document MIS 2, one must turn to the Faleme Valley (Senegal), where data is now available from research conducted since 2011. Complemented with other scattered data from West Africa, it is now possible to propose a nearly continuous techno-cultural history for the Upper Pleistocene, supplemented by substantive evidence from the Early Holocene. We can now demonstrate significant diversity in lithic production systems, the probable times of their appearance and disappearance, and their very rapid rate of change. The Middle Stone Age in West Africa thus reflects a unique techno-cultural mosaic and technological history, very different from that observed in the Sahara and North Africa.

Born at the end of the nineteenth century at a time of the introduction of mass schooling, the notion of “literacy” is current in many fields of the arts and humanities. Keywords: class; cultural history; Egyptian history; gender; Greek history; history of science, medicine and technology; history of the book and printing; Late Antiquity

International audience; Baya-Laffite and Cointet map the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations topic structure and evolution over 20 years using a digital corpus from the most renowned internal journal of the negotiations available online, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB). The authors’ methodological strategy combines text mining, network analysis and data visualization tools. The chapter shows how this mixed-method strategy applied to a digital corpus drawn from the ENB website, makes it possible to map climate change negotiations. Mixing traditional research methods and computer-assisted techniques, as well as manual and automated operations results in a series of unique new visual syntheses of the UNFCCC process. Narrating the visualizations allows distant readings of topics’ semantic structure and topic trajectories and thereby to test the robustness of the maps as well as the tools and methods used to produce them.