Our research work is part of the research programs "History of port landscapes" and "Digital Humanities" developed within the framework of the research group PAM 3D Lab, where Center Francois Viete (EA 1161) collaborates with Lab-STICC and CERV. One of those axes concerns the understanding of the scientic and technological evolution of ports (Brest in France, Mar del Plata and Rosario in Argentina) in the contemporary era with a methodological approach considering the port as a Large Technological System [?]. The aim is to build and validate new methods in digital humanities both for history and for development of the scientic, technological and industrial heritage applied to ports. From a computer perspective, our methods are based on knowledge engineering, ontologies and semantic web.

 

The hypothesis is to consider a port as a Large Technological System (or

LTS) [?] whose spatio-temporal evolution as an artifact 3 [?] is part of studies in HST. This evolution can be considered as multi-scale (on both space and time). The harbor itself consists of a set of artifacts at various levels of granularity such as ret forms, jetties, wharves, cranes, moorings, or industrial production units (forges, rope factory, etc.). Periodizing the port in HST requires to highlight moments of breaks linked to the evolutions of some specic artifacts and thus to identify periods where the system is stable between two breaks.

 

In addition, studying the life cycle of an artifact leads to analyze the nature of human activities. In the case of LTS, it is a matter of selecting relevant artifacts to periodize this system and then to characterize the entities in relation to them. Periodicizing a LTS and dening cycles of evolution of a port over a long period of time is thus tantamount to selecting relevant artifacts, i.e. artifacts that account for the studied periodization. Each of the artifacts forms tangible traces of port evolution at dierent scales of time and space.