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This paper introduces HistText, a pioneering tool devised to facilitate large-scale data mining in historical documents, specifically targeting Chinese sources. Developed in response to the challenges posed by the massive Modern China Textual Database, HistText emerges as a solution to efficiently extract and visualize valuable insights from billions of words spread across millions of documents. With a user-friendly interface, advanced text analysis techniques, and powerful data visualization capabilities, HistText offers a robust platform for digital humanities research. This paper explores the rationale behind HistText, underscores its key features, and provides a comprehensive guide for its effective utilization, thus highlighting its potential to substantially enhance the realm of computational humanities. International audience

The displacement from the essay film to the video installation has in Chris Marker one of its first and most relevant figures. The comparative study of Zapping Zone. Proposal for an imaginary television (1990) and Level Five (1997) allows for the analysis of the construction and complexification, and the deconstruction and saturation processes that take place between the most complex expression of the Markerian essay film and its transformation into the video installation. Zapping Zone responds to the embodiment of both the magmatic stage of the postmodern audiovisual era and the starting point of the filmmaker's work (documentaries, essay films, video installations, etc.), which would be the opposite of the writer’s blank page: a saturated world of images that needs to be selected, analysed and worked on in order to build meaning. Level Five offers the filmmaker’s reflection on that same reality, applied to the Battle of Okinawa, through a complex audiovisual thinking process that hybridises different types of images—documentary and fictional; analogue and electronic—devices—epistolary video diary, video game and cyberspace—and their authorial subjectivities—Laura, Laura’s lover and Chris—in order to reflect on the relationship between these audiovisual forms and spaces and the thematic axis memory-pain-oblivion. International audience

This article builds on work conducted and lessons learned within SILKNOW, a research project that aimed at enhancing the preservation and digital dissemination of silk heritage. Taking the project and this heritage typology as a case study in the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions, it illustrates specific challenges that these institutions must face and demonstrates a few innovative answers to meet those challenges. The methodology combines approaches typical of the humanities and others usual in ICT, being inductive regarding materials and methods (consisting of a detailed review of existing online repositories and research projects devoted to textile heritage) and descriptive for the results and discussion (which explain at length the development of some tools and resources that responded to the needs detected in the previous analysis). The article reports on the state of the art and recent developments in the field of textile heritage, the tools implemented to allow the semantic access and text analysis of descriptive records associated with silk fabrics, and the spatiotemporal visualization of that information. Finally, it argues that institutional policies, namely the creation and free dissemination of open data related to cultural heritage are just as important as technical developments, showing why any future effort in these areas should take data sustainability, both in its technical and in institutional aspects, into account, since it is the most responsible and reasonable approach in terms of efficient resource allocation. Research leading to these results has taken place within the research project “SILKNOW. Silk heritage in the Knowledge Society: from punched cards to big data, deep learning and vi- sual/tangible simulations”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 769504; as well as within “ClioViz. Visualización avanzada de datos históricos a través de mapas multidimensionales y gráficos interactivos” (ref. no. PID2021- 126777NB-I00), a research project funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER-UE. Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación European Union’s Horizon 2020

Comparative macro-archaeological investigations of the human deep past rely on the availability of unified, quality-checked datasets integrating different layers of observation. Information on the durable and ubiquitous record of Paleolithic stone artefacts and technological choices are especially pertinent to this endeavour. We here present a large expert-sourced collaborative dataset for the study of stone tool technology and artefact shape evolution across Europe between ~15.000 and 11.000 years before present. The dataset contains a compendium of key sites from the study period, and data on lithic technology and toolkit composition at the level of the cultural taxa represented by those sites. The dataset further encompasses 2D shapes of selected lithic artefact groups (armatures, endscrapers, and borers/perforators) shared between cultural taxa. These data offer novel possibilities to explore between-regional patterns of material culture change to reveal scale-dependent processes of long-term technological evolution in mobile hunter-gatherer societies at the end of the Pleistocene. Our dataset facilitates state-of-the-art quantitative analyses and showcases the benefits of collaborative data collation and synthesis. International audience

Background Diphtheria, caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae, reemerges in Europe since 2022. Genomic sequencing can inform on transmission routes and genotypes of concern, but currently, no standard approach exists to detect clinically important genomic features and to interpret emergence in the global C. diphtheriae population framework. Methods We developed the bioinformatics pipeline DIPHTOSCAN (available at https://gitlab.pasteur.fr/BEBP/diphtoscan) to extract from genomes of Corynebacteria of the diphtheriae species complex, medically relevant features including tox gene presence and disruption. We analyzed 101 human C. diphtheriae isolates collected in 2022 in metropolitan and overseas France (France-2022). To define the population background of this emergence, we sequenced 379 additional isolates (mainly from France, 2018-2021) and collated 870 publicly-available genomes. Results The France-2022 isolates comprised 45 tox-positive (44 toxigenic) isolates, mostly imported, belonging to 10 sublineages (<500 distinct core genes). The global dataset comprised 245 sublineages and 33.9% toxpositive genomes, with DIPHTOSCAN predicting non-toxigenicity in 16.0% of these. 12% of the global isolates, and 43.6% of France-2022 ones, were multidrug resistant. Convergence of toxigenicity with penicillin and erythromycin resistance was observed in 2 isolates from France-2022. Phylogenetic lineages Gravis and Mitis contrasted strikingly in their pathogenicity-associated genes. Conclusions This work provides a bioinformatics tool and global population framework to analyze C. diphtheriae genomes, revealing important heterogeneities in virulence and resistance features. Emerging genotypes combining toxigenicity and first-line antimicrobial resistance represent novel threats. Genomic epidemiology studies of C. diphtheriae should be intensified globally to improve understanding of reemergence and spatial spread. International audience

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The substantial two-volume work Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639) by the Franciscanfriar Francesco Quaresmio (b. Lodi, Italy, 1583–1656) is known as a veritableencyclopaedia on the Holy Land. It is also an itinerary of pilgrimage through thesacred sites, taking their monumentality and graphic landscape into account.Quaresmio was especially attentive to the Latin inscriptions made by the Crusaders, 10here copied by him as autoptic testimonies. This is part of a more general phenomenon.From the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth, in Europe this period issometimes called the “Age of Inscriptions”, during which epigraphy was recognizedas a source of ancient history on a par with philology and archaeology. The overallaim of the present article is to show how Quaresmio, while continuing a medieval 15tradition of Franciscan scholarship, improved upon epigraphical study by deployinga specific technology, namely the visual rendering of uncial inscriptions in printedform. His rigorous observations, however, would have come to naught without thetechnical mastery of the Flemish printer-typographer Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641).Following previous developments in pilgrimage literature, where inscriptions – espe- 20cially the Crusader epitaphs at the foot of Calvary – were commonplace, Quaresmiostudied inscriptions not only as texts, but also considered their formal and materialaspects. Ultimately, the present study argues that these Latin epigraphic texts playeda role in the man’s theological argumentation and in the defence of the loca sancta asLatin possession. International audience