The Haut Adour workshop is part of a series of meetings on geohistory organised by the IR*Huma-Num Projets Time Machine (Cst PTM) Consortium and the Labex Dynamite "Systèmes de peuplement sur le temps long" working group.
This is the third meeting after a first iteration at Royaumont Abbey and a second at the Château de Ligoure.
The aim of this cycle was to examine the use of the spatial dimension in the historical sciences. Today, this dimension has a very special place in the context of the multiplication and massification of digital practices, where geographic information systems (GIS), the geoweb, the web of data, AI and many other technologies offer us tools and standards for constructing, processing and disseminating our data in an interoperable way on the web.
There are many issues at stake here for our personal work, for our academic community and for our societies.
Faced with an ever-expanding technological ecosystem, we need to step back and analyse these tools, which are also the bearers of ideas, social projects, utopias, economic interests and dominant models, whether conscious or not, because they are part of the socio-technical systems that shape research. The transformations in our practices and know-how are not just technical, but are as much constructions in which we play an active part as they are changes to which we are subject. As a new challenge, they place the principles of sharing at the heart of our approaches, which must be built on critical, shared and interoperable practices.
The overall idea of these workshops is therefore to bring together a community around digital tools and beyond strictly academic circles to exchange know-how, create exchange, sharing, networking... in other words to critically build common ground.
This reflection/action is all the more strategic because, to take the field of cartographic representations alone, the way in which maps are designed and produced today outside and within the academic world is overturning the most stable categories of traditional cartography: The eminent role played by interfaces and the organisation of digital information, as well as the arrival of technologies grouped together under the generic term of AI, invites us to rethink the entire operational chain of information production in the historical sciences as in other disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, and calls into question the very notion of the map and the role of the various players involved.
It is no longer just a matter of placing historical information on a geographical map, but of producing a geographical representation of historical knowledge that draws on a wide range of skills (academic, citizen, scholarly, algorithmic, etc.) and complementary questions, and whose results, which are now digital and interoperable, can potentially be mobilised and re-mobilised well beyond the circle of specialists who produced them.
Drawing on this line of reasoning about the map and extending it to our various practices now means thinking afresh about the practical foundations of a new geohistory that brings together academic circles and citizens' initiatives, and re-articulates data and knowledge about space-time.
Over the course of an intensive week of practical work and reflection, we propose to explore the various aspects of geohistorical data and its processing tools in the digital context of open science and participatory science. As in previous editions, the aim will be to position ourselves at the interface between fields, practices, know-how and analytical approaches.
This exercise, which combines know-how and a reflexive dimension, will be conducted in the context of the issues raised by the location of our workshop, the Haut-Adour (Haute-Pyrénées), around a structuring object: water and the gravity systems associated with it. The issue of water, in all its complexity (network, location, variation over time, cycles, terrain, documentation, environmental, social and cultural contexts, etc.) has the advantage of covering many aspects of our questions and practices.
