École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) is a centre of excellence in the sciences, actively participating in the digital revolution, with a significant focus on Digital Humanities (DH).
EPHE is involved in numerous Digital Humanities and Religious Studies projects, including:
AOROC: The AOROC lab focuses on archaeology and philology of the Orient and Occident, combining multidisciplinary research teams from CNRS, ENS, and EPHE within the University PSL.
Biblissima+: An observatory of written heritage from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Cachette de Karnak: Inventory and access to photographic documentation of ancient Egyptian artefacts.
CRCAO: Centre for Research on East Asian Civilisations.
eScripta: The digital component of the Scripta-PSL project, applying AI to rare and historical languages.
GREI: Research Group for Indian Studies. The GREI studies the languages, literatures, religions, and intellectual cultures of ancient and medieval India, focusing on Indo-Iranian protohistory, Vedic and classical Brahmanism, and the spread of Indian civilization through Buddhism, covering languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Persian, and examining religious aspects including Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
GSRL: The “Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités” (GSRL) brings together researchers from various disciplines (history, sociology, political science, anthropology, philosophy, law, etc.) who are concerned with the transformations of religion and questions of secularism in the contemporary world.
HISTARA: The HISTARA lab explores the history of art, cultural and social history, political history, and the history of ideas through interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies.
LEM: The Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (LEM) aims to study the texts and doctrines of the European and Mediterranean religious traditions from a historical and comparative perspective, detached from confessional considerations.
manuscriptologIA: This project supports a computing cluster (GPU) dedicated to the massive analysis of images of inscribed objects.
Orient & Méditerranée: Research unit (UMR 8167) focusing on historical, philological, and religious sciences, studying the Near East and Mediterranean world from antiquity to the medieval period, and comprising six research teams and two institutes (Byzantine Studies, Medieval Islam).
PaganTibet: The PaganTibet project aims to reconstruct pre-Buddhist religious practices in Tibet by studying a vast collection of ancient Tibetan manuscripts using advanced computational and philological methods.
RESILIENCE: EPHE is consortium partner of the European infrastructure for research on religion.
Sigilla: A database on French sigillographic sources.
Vietnamica: Analysis of inscriptions on Vietnamese village steles.
The École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) supports the development of several digital tools, particularly within the framework of the aforementioned projects:
CRTA: The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) provides reliable bibliographic and academic information about Chinese religious texts, focusing on texts produced prior to 1949.
eScriptorium: A software designed to assist researchers at every stage of producing digital editions. The transcription module is already available. It is based on Kraken and takes the form of a web interface. It can be used for page segmentation, whether automatic or manual (automatic detection of text lines, layout decoration, etc.).
Kraken: An optical character recognition (OCR) software that transforms images of documents, especially handwritten ones, into text files. Kraken can analyse and segment documents with complex layouts and transcribe all types of writing.
EPHE offers training in digital humanities and partners in the PSL Master’s programme in Digital Humanities.
The programme of the Conferences covers a wide range of topics, including pre-Islamic languages and religions of Central Asia, the major monotheisms, Chinese archaeology, papyrology, Hebrew, Latin, Byzantine palaeography, Greek dialectology and Digital Humanities.
Go here for the prosopographical dictionary of all researchers at EPHE with the possibility of a thematic search to find experts in your field.
For further information on Digital Humanities and its team see Humanités numériques | École Pratique des Hautes Études.
(Photo by Frédéric Labrouche.)