The research on cultural heritage makes the confrontation between material objects and multidisciplinary studies the arena for the production of collective knowledge. In the digital age, this is then a privileged framework for studying the collective analysis and interpretation of facts, objects and phenomena that bring together a new generation of data towards the construction of new scientific resources - our tomorrow’s heritage. How can one memorise these bundles of individual gazes converging on the same object of study? How can one analyse their dynamics of construction, of overlap and of fusion leading to new knowledge? This project introduces a new field - a territory of multidisciplinary and multidimensional digitally born data - as raw material for studying the mechanisms of knowledge production in cultural heritage. Introducing a pioneering approach in computational modelling and digitisation, this project benefits from the exceptional experimental framework of the scientific worksite on Notre-Dame de Paris (involving today 175 researchers coming from disciplines like archaeology, anthropology, architecture, history, chemistry, physics and computer scientist) to build an emblematic corpus of data on scientific practices in heritage science, in the digital age. Within this unique opportunity to produce and analyse masses of born digital scientific data, n-Dame_Heritage will deliver a generalisable approach, a replicable methodology and an open and reusable digital ecosystem to build cathedrals of knowledge by the collaborative research on material objects. By introducing and experimenting next generation methods and tools for the semantic-driven data production and analysis, this project shifts the cursor of digitisation, from the physical object to the knowledge for understanding it, in order to analyse the interdependence between its complex facets and the related knowledge objects built by scholars through their research practices.

MethylRIDE: Charting DNA methylation reprogramming of Ice Age horses in the face of global climate change and extinction Adaptation is one of the most essential processes in biology, by which species become fit to their environment. Following Charles Darwin, adaptation appears as the result of natural selection acting upon heritable variation. However, recent epigenetic discoveries have established the capacity of non-genetic changes in the regulatory layers of gene expression to shape our traits, including our medical phenotype. As such, our realized phenotype can no longer be considered as the sole product of our genome, but more as the combinatory by-product of our genome and epigenomes. The outcome of natural selection, which favors phenotypes associated to a higher reproductive success in a given environment, might, thus, be at least partly influenced by epigenetic changes. Yet, the possible participation of epigenetic changes in the process of biological adaptation is generally overlooked. MethylRIDE will take advantage of the preservation of ancient DNA molecules in paleontological material to track the changes in DNA methylation profiles of Ice Age horses, as they faced changing climatic conditions and selection pressures and, ultimately, became extinct. The unique combination of novel experimental and computational techniques developed will help assess, for the first time, the role of epigenetics in long-term adaptive strategies of large vertebrates in response to rapid climate change, and more generally the role of epigenetic change as a significant evolutionary force.