Our project is to provide the prosopographic searchable database of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names of Oxford with a linguistic extension and to extract a printed dictionary to replace the book of F. Bechtel 1917 Die historischen Personennamen des Griechischen bis zur Kaiserzeit (= ?PN, about 15,000 names), which is now out of date since philology and linguistics have made significant progress and the quantity of data has increased greatly: of the 35,000 names currently known thanks to the around 350,000 persons who bore them, about 30,000 would be considered as definitely Greek personal names. Linguistic analysis is intended to make clear the morphology, etymology and semantics of these names. For each name, whatever its structure (mainly mono- or di-thematic), the analysis protocol will yield the following data — some already available in the current prosopographical LGPN database: (1-6) transliterated and Greek form of the name; number of occurrences; grammatical gender; dialectal areas and period. (7-13): etymological analysis to make clear its morphology, by division into its roots and suffixes. (14-16): grammatical and, except for simple names, syntactical-semantical structure, to help identify the head of the different types of compounds; semantics of the root(s) of the simple or compound name; comparison of the name with words of the lexicon or collocations found in the ancient sources of whatever type (epigraphical, papyrological and literary), and lexicographic bibliography. (17): relevant onomastic bibliography. The programme will be carried out at three inseparable and complementary levels: 1. entirely new and innovative basic research, important in terms of scholarship and cultural heritage 2. training of students for research by means of research in the context of collaboration between three institutions and research centres of international standing in the field of classical studies: the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, section des sciences historiques et philologiques, where the Project director is directeur d'études, the Université Paris-Sorbonne, Faculty of Greek, the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford; and the UMR 8210 Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques, the UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée and The Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names 3. a twofold exploitation of the results by putting active data on line, searchable via the language XML and the international encoding standard of TEI, and the extraction of a printed dictionary. The 4 years of funding which we are applying for correspond to the successive stages of the research, whose program will mainly follow the alphabetical order of names, beginning with those in Bechtel's HPN. Thus, the 1st year will be devoted to names beginning with the letters A-E (about 7,000 names left); the 2nd year, with Z-? (about 7,500); the 3rd, with M-? (about 7,500) and the last, with ?-O (about 8,000). This exponential progression is possible because, once the root of a name has been analysed, data are automatically input when it re-appears either in another simple name combining the root and another suffix, or in another compound combining the root with another. This project was endorsed by the IUF in 2014, with the appointment of its coordinator as a member and 5 years of little annual support. It has also received the support of the Oxford team, in the form of a year’s funding (2015-2016) to employ a scholar responsible for creating the linguistic interface, testing it with 1,500 names beginning with A- and preparing the interconnection of the two databases and interoperability of the data. The two tools, one digital and one printed, will be useful both to the scientific community and the general public, whose interest in the origin and meaning of names relates to our cultural heritage.

The project JEANVI is to publish a full annotated French translation of John VI Kantakouzenos’ Histories, a fundamental source for understanding the history of Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century. Secondly, a new thematic biography of John VI Kantakouzenos (1295/96-1388) written by a young generation of historians specialized in the late Byzantine period will be written, including contributions by foreign leading scholars. This project builds on the significant discovery made in autumn 2010 of a full French translation (956 pages) of John VI’s Histories completed by the Sorbonne professor of Byzantine studies Rodolphe Guilland (1888-1981). The author bequeathed this translation in 1977 to the French Institute of Byzantine Studies (IFEB) but it remained unnoticed until now. This work will be carefully anotated and revised. The three edited volumes will be: John VI Kantakouzenos : Byzantium between Islam and the West, I. Histories. French translation by Rodolphe Guilland (†) edited and annotated under the direction of Olivier Delouis, 2 vols. John VI Kantakouzenos : Byzantium between Islam and the West, II. Emperor and monk. A thematic biography directed by Olivier Delouis, 1 vol. Note: The project has already been submitted in 2011. All comments have been taken into account. Many points have been added : they are in bold un the project document.

Byzantine Studies, the field of the Humanities which investigates the history and culture of the Eastern Christian medieval empire centred upon Constantinople (4th to 15th C.), have been historically forged by cooperation between French and German scholars. Compared to the Classical and Western medieval world, Byzantium suffers from a lack of documentary evidence: however, while very few documents have been preserved, the seals which accompanied them have survived in large numbers and hold a great deal of information. These seals are the object of research of Byzantine sigillography, but their dispersal in scattered collections and the absence of widely shared standards for their publication has hindered the exploitation of their full potential for Byzantine Studies. The aim of this Franco-German project is to make use of the new capacities of digital presentation offered by the Digital Humanities to redress this situation, and to enable new understandings of Byzantium by transforming Byzantine sigillography. The core of the project will be the scholarly edition and publication of four major collections of seals (ca. 4.000 seals). On these collections extensive historical and sigillographic analysis will be performed: each seal will be studied as a research object per se through individual editions, while the edited corpora as a whole will be investigated through a number of targeted historical studies. Encoding these collections will enable us to build on work already done by the team to develop an encoding standard for seals (SigiDoc): we will test and improve this standard against the different requirements of these four collections. We will transform the reading and presentation of individual seals by the use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and exploit a range of resources to draw on external information—such as geodata—and make each item available as Linked Open Data. Finally, we will develop and test the use of a common centralised sigillographic portal allowing for global cross-corpus search. Concern is frequently expressed about the sustainability of digital resources. We aim to address this in two ways: our resources will be conserved by the Très Grande Infrastructure de Recherche (TGIR) Huma-Num and the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) in Cologne, which partakes in the Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI). But, perhaps more importantly, we will ensure extensive knowledge exchange; we will work with curators to enable them to manage and enrich their holdings and to reach a wider public; and we will train scholars, curators, and students to use all our tools for their own research, in order to create individual publications which can be searched through our common sigillographic portal. In this way we aim to embed new tools and new skills within the study of Byzantium.

This project focuses on the exploitation of bitumen deposits in southern Albania and proposes a transhistorical and transdisciplinary approach. It is based on a double hypothesis and has a twofold objective: on the one hand, we consider that this natural resource has shaped the region from which it is extracted in the longue durée and we will seek to explain to what extent its mode of exploitation, its uses and circulation have affected the surrounding society (land property structures, intercommunity relations, religious beliefs and practices, landscape and health status of the population). On the other hand, we consider that the bitumen as an “object” invites to an interdisciplinary approach and we propose to use it as an observatory of the implementation of the collaboration between disciplines (archeology, history, geology, anthropology, geography), thus reflecting on how each discipline involved contributes to building that object and, in turn, is affected by it. The project is scientifically organized around four themes: - Material and technological dimension. As the bitumen material is at the centre of the project, it is a question of studying, through chemical and physical analyses and studies, present or past, the different types of extracted products, their qualities, the possibilities and techniques of extraction; the location, extent and type of deposits; the types of transformations (on site or off site - for example, Marseille, Bari, etc.) and the uses of these products, as well as their packaging. Other materials and objects needed for the production and transport chain will also be considered. - Material and technological dimension. As bitumen material is at the centre of the project, it is a question of studying, through chemical and physical analyses and studies, present or past, the different types of products extracted, their qualities, the possibilities and techniques of extraction; the location, extent and type of deposits; the types of transformation and uses of these products, as well as their packaging. Other materials and objects necessary for the production and transport chain will also be studied. - Knowledge and beliefs. In Antiquity, the bitumen deposit was associated with a sanctuary located in the south of the Greek colony of Apollonia of Illyria founded by Corinth in the last quarter of the 7th century BC. This sanctuary of the Nymphs, which was also a bitumen deposit exploited from antiquity and where a flame permanently burned, visible from afar in the landscape, was the source of a singular oracle, but its exact location remains to be discovered. It is also a question of looking at the evolution of technical and commercial knowledge, from antiquity to scientific studies, from the end of the 18th century onwards. - Territories, spaces, landscapes. This dimension concerns the territory used and mobilized according to the times for the extraction of bitumen. Attention will be paid to the link with land issues, as the mine was located in the Ottoman period in an imperial domain, which later became a state farm in the 20th century. The concession system introduced in the second half of the 19th century also raises the question of sovereignty. At a regional level, therefore, it will also be necessary to analyse the articulation with the agro-sylvo-pastoral space, as well as the impact on the landscape and the environment. - Men and women. This concerns the social dimension, be it the question of the organisation of work (ethno-confessional, men and women, managers/workers, local/foreign) and the interactions between different groups (Muslims, Vlachs, foreigners) or its institutional frameworks. Specific forms of labour (such as forced labour mentioned for the Ottoman and communist periods) and their articulation with other activities, including agro-sylvo-pastoral activities, will also be studied.

The ECOMED project (Economies of the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages, 1350-1500) brings together some 41 researchers from Spain, France, Italy and Greece, all of whom are specialized in the study of the Mediterranean worlds and are particularly interested in questions related to interculturality and the interconnection between different societies. It starts from the observation that there is a divergence between historiographies concerning Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, the former being based on a body of research on climate, the effects of the plague and the economic situation, which is still largely lacking for the Mediterranean area. The project considers the Mediterranean area as a unique space where the questions are posed in the same way. The heterogeneity of the documentary regime of the Byzantine, Muslim and Christian worlds has given rise to very different historiographies, although the problems encountered are similar: the presence and recurrence of the plague, the multiplication of famines and famines in a climate that had become unstable and tended to be wetter and colder at the beginning of the "Little Ice Age", the political instability manifested by incessant and devastating wars and state recompositions constitute facts that are common to the entire basin. The relevance of a divergence in the 15th century between the South and the North must be examined, as must the differences between East and West, while all the evidence also points to practices favouring interculturality between the Muslim and Christian worlds. The ECOMED project will study the environmental challenges encountered on both sides of the sea; agricultural and artisanal production; the use and circulation of raw materials and merchandises; the institutions and conflicts structuring the period and the area; and social mobility and growth.