Dorra BASSI
Laboratoire Intersignes (LR14ES01)
FSHST – University of Tunis

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tunis (FSHST) hosted a major event on February 29 and March 1, 2024, organized by the Intersignes Laboratory (LR14ES01) and the Doctoral School for Structures, Systems, Models, and Practices. This event, supported by the University of Tunis as part of its commitment to promoting research on Digital Humanities and in the context of the ongoing activities of the Raqmyat project, aimed to make Digital Humanities a subject of study and a space for reflection. While we await the publication of the proceedings, this first analysis provides a preliminary assessment of the initiative.

Over these two days, the FSHST brought together partners from universities in Algeria, Morocco, France, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, Tunisia. These participants represented various Tunisian and foreign research laboratories. We believe we succeeded in making CICNIA a moment of reflection, an opportunity to discover and share practices and experiences, and a chance to learn and train in the use of specific tools.

Digital Technology: New Corpora and/or New Challenges

Digital corpora and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not innovations in themselves, as our speakers highlighted by referencing projects that sometimes date back more than 20 years. The new questions lie primarily on epistemological, methodological, and ethical grounds. Professor François Rastier’s presentation on the relationship between corpora and AI was an opportunity to show that generative AI, which draws its data from datasets protected by industrial secrecy, is at odds with the rigor demanded by scientific inquiry.

With extensive experience in creating literary and lexicographical databases, as well as using the Frantext database, Professor Isabelle Turcan raised the question: Is the implicit in discourse automatable? In the particular case of diachronic corpora, the unspoken elements, crucial in a comparative approach, would be difficult for machines to decipher.

The reflection continued with Mr. Molay Hassan Soussou, who questioned the future of genetic literary corpora. Using the example of the Bovary Workshop at the University of Rouen-Normandy, he demonstrated the increasing role of digital tools in publishing and decoding not only the author’s drafts but also everything surrounding Flaubert’s text, such as its Arabic translations or the author’s correspondence.

In his talk titled “Motif Analysis for Stylistics (and Linguistics)” Professor Dominique Legallois presented a computer-based method that can automatically extract motifs from corpora. These motifs would be more meaningful than other tools, or at least provide complementary assistance when identifying an author’s stylistic particularities.

Corpora and Opportunities: Explored Fields and Ongoing Projects

The symposium was also an opportunity to present several projects involving our speakers. Riccardo Barontini introduced the DigEco project, “Digital Ecocriticism,” which explores a corpus of around 1,000 French-language novels (from 2001 to the present) to question anthropocentrism in contemporary French-language fiction. Mr. Samir Challaoui invited us to discover Maghrebisms as linguistic phenomena that convey transcendent and plural cultures. The issues related to data collection, material description, and lexicon creation were particularly emphasized. Professor Cristelle Cavalla discussed digital corpora that are useful and usable in language teaching, showing how these corpora are constructed and in what contexts they are explored.

History was also featured, with Safia Hamdi’s presentation, “The City as Wonder, the City as Embellishment: Paris in 17th- and 18th-Century Guides.” She revealed an ongoing project to build a corpus from the digitized collections of Parisian libraries, focusing on tourist and scholarly guides of Paris. Her intervention highlighted the multidisciplinary questions such a corpus could raise.

Two presentations examined social networks, specifically Facebook. Faten Somaï reflected on “Humor on Facebook,” showing how the dark humor produced by Tunisians on social media during crises raises questions about its mechanisms. Ameni Tlili presented the results of her exploration of a corpus formed from a set of written conversations on the Facebook walls of 13 participants during three periods: before, during, and after the January 2011 revolution.

In the same panel, Anis Nouairi introduced the world of RPGs (Role-Playing Games) in his talk, “Back to the Book: Video Games as a Literary Medium.” He questioned the ability of video games to introduce literary texts to their players and how the exchange between the literary corpus and its adaptation into video games is established.

Hands-On Learning: The Workshops

We take pride in having organized four workshops as part of the CICNIA symposium. The trainers were computer scientists and linguists, experts in their fields.

With nearly 150 participants trained over two afternoons, we can only celebrate the success of this practical component. The workshops covered FRANTEXT, a historical tool for consulting French texts (with Professor Jacques François and Ms. Rania Samet); Tropes, software for semantic, syntactic, and discursive analysis of literary texts (with Mr. Yacoub Guerissi); and IRaMuTeQ, statistical software for textual data analysis (with Mr. Fathi Ghariani). Additionally, thanks to the support of the Doctoral School for Structures, Systems, Models, and Practices, a workshop was held offering researchers writing their academic work in French access to textual databases and tools to improve their writing. The doctoral workshop “Professional Writing in French: The Help of Digital Corpora,” led by Professor Cristelle Cavalla, allowed a diverse audience to work with doctoral students on writing assistance corpora such as ScienQuest and Lexicoscope.

This diversity of topics seems particularly important and aligned with the spirit driving our approach: networking and introducing young or experienced researchers to innovative research avenues or tools that may be unknown to them and that could save them time or improve rigor. This was the goal of our symposium, and we hope we succeeded. Beyond the unquestionable quality of the interventions and speakers, the exchanges facilitated by this symposium allowed us to reconnect or establish new contacts, identify overlaps between projects and project leaders, and raise methodological and epistemological questions. It revealed corpora in search of explorers, questions awaiting answers, and issues to which new tools could offer new solutions.

This work cannot end with just one meeting. It continues through digital means (again!) on the dedicated project sharing space. It will also continue with various events we participate in or initiate, such as the upcoming doctoral symposium in June 2024 at the University of Tunis as part of the Raqmyat project. Most importantly, it will continue through the partnerships that can form between the researchers who contributed, each in their own way, to the success of this event. This event could not have taken place without the shared conviction that the university space is a place of innovation and sharing.