The National Library of France (BnF) is launching the new edition of its call for researchers, in order to enlist the support of young researchers interested in the study of its collections, in particular the lesser known or unpublished, with the aim of enrich their knowledge and facilitate access to it. The status of BnF associate researcher allows a privileged relationship with the Library, through a welcome at the heart of its departments and its collections.
In addition to the advantages offered to all associated researchers, the BnF will award four research grants on specific subjects.
The Mark Pigott Research Grant for Digital Humanities, created in 2014, is worth €10,000
It is awarded to support innovative research in the field of digital humanities and artificial intelligence. Concerning the digital collections of the BnF, the research must rely on an original analysis approach, in particular by the application of methods relating to data mining, automated extraction of information, generation of models, without excluding traditional approaches which can benefit from renewed perspectives.
Established over thirty years, the digital collections of the BnF today represent a considerable mass of data of great diversity, both in terms of their typology and their content: documents resulting from the digitization of the collections and available in Gallica ( images, texts from OCR, metadata, objects); audiovisual and multimedia collections on support (video games, DVDs, CD-Roms, etc.); web archives and other digital documents collected by legal deposit; metadata from the different catalogs (general catalog of the BnF, Archives and manuscripts, Collective catalog of France), etc. Whether resulting from digitization or natively digital, these collections open up new fields of research and new perspectives for the study and exploitation of large-scale corpora: mass analysis, annotation, automatic language processing, geolocation, document vectorization, shape recognition, network analysis, etc.
Candidates are free to propose their own subjects or to choose among those proposed by the BnF in the field “Digital Humanities & Artificial Intelligence” (see the corresponding thematic entry in the call).
Topics of previous Mark Pigott scholarships in the field of digital humanities:
2023
Another literary story at the BnF
2022
Navigating knowledge in the digital age. A study of navigation practices on Gallica
2017
“French Touch”: discursive construction or aesthetic reality? A study of French video games from the 1980s and 1990s.
2014
Study of the controversy over “neuro-law” based on internet archives
Deadline for receipt of applications: May 2, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. Paris time