New tools

The tools of the digital humanities - statistical, lexical, network and key-word analysis, word frequency counts, text mining, historical statistics (which pose specific problems given the nature of the sources), concordancing, links to create dynamic footnoting between online articles, and so on - which were not available to previous generations of researchers, permit us to work on new questions, and open up the possibility of collaboration with research teams from different specialisations.

The texts we use are inscribed upon different supports (stone inscriptions, papyri, ostraca, parchment, paper), and may also include images or other materials (seals, coins, and so on). The analysis of these documents with new techniques will allow us to compile, evaluate, and diffuse large amounts of data.

To a large extent, the ability of researchers to apply these tools to texts depends on their existence in an accessible, digitised form, but much of the material necessary to this project is available only in print, and is often inaccessible to non-specialists. While we will not undertake large-scale digitisation of corpora, we will produce several digital resources which will enable the study of the concept of peace in a cross-cultural fashion in the languages and periods which are part of the project.

Among the results of our research will be on-line resources, including:

• articles on the languages under study and the corpora under analysis;
• articles produced by the international team of researchers brought together by this project;
• a lexical database containing the principal terms considered relevant to the study of the lexical field of peace in each language. This database will be fully searchable, allowing the user to explore the concept of peace by language, referent, cultural tradition, date, geographical space, and so on. This database will also allow the generation of a dictionary of the lexical field of peace in different languages.

Development and diffusion of knowledge

An analysis of the referents of our lexicon will be illustrated by their usage in the texts of our corpus, compiled in the form of a database. Once developed, this multilingual database will allow the generation of new insights and hypotheses about the development, transmission and boundaries of culturally specific concepts of peace.

This treatment of texts using the lexicographical tools which are the basis of this research program will permit us not only to produce new insights, thanks to the new methods, but also to work with new ways of diffusing knowledge. Thus, specialists from other disciplines, as well as the general educated public, will have access through our outputs to material previously restricted to specialists, historians and philologists.

To cite this article

Sylvie Denoix & Korshi Dosoo, "Digital Humanities", Les mots de la paix/Terminology of peace [on-line]. Uploaded 22/3/2016, accessed