PORTIC
How to study 18th century’s economic exchanges with uncertain historic data ?
Reconstructing the economic landscape of France at the turn of the 1789 Revolution, grounding on uncertain data. PORTIC involves an interdisciplinary collective of historians, computer scientists and designers in three enquiries based on two existing economic history databases, providing an opportunity to experiment with new formats for collaboration and publication.
Project presentation
The ANR PORTIC program (2019-2023) intends to study the spatial and economic dynamics at work in the process of building increasingly integrated markets announcing and accompanying the Industrial Revolution. To this end, it cross-references data on the navigation of French ports with data dealing with the balance of trade, in order to better grasp the articulation between regional, national and international areas of French trade in the 18th century. It is based on two existing corpuses – Navigocorpus and Toflit18 – produced during two completed ANR programs. The cross-referencing of the two corpuses makes it possible, among other things, to estimate more precisely the respective shares of national and foreign trade, to refine knowledge about ports that articulate markets and their interactions, to analyze regional phenomena of specialization between several ports, and to measure the impact of conflicts on the economy of a port, to take the measure of smuggling across the Channel, to weigh up the share of the French in international transport services that escaped the trade statistics of the time, or to calculate the ratio between the value of trade and the tonnage or manpower assigned to maritime transport as a function of flows. While historians and economists will use this data to advance knowledge about the contribution of international trade and navigation to French growth in the 18th century, PORTIC also aims to enable everyone to explore the data, using this site, which proposes a progressive and guided approach to the data, taking into account their "imperfect" nature.
Indeed, PORTIC, a project co-constructed by historians, economists, geomaticians, computer scientists, and specialists in information communication via the Web, develops tools that allow a clear, scientifically irreproachable and calibrated visualization of historical information for different audiences, taking fully into account their so-called "imperfect" nature. The imperfection of historical data derives from documentary gaps, contradictory information delivered by different sources, or imprecise content. This uncertain nature of some of the information, which is fundamental when aiming at understanding the past, is currently insufficiently integrated by data visualization tools, especially flow visualization tools. It is thus a matter of providing correct access to this knowledge and making the public aware of the degree of certainty of the information.
The digital humanities accompany all stages of the project. First of all, they allow the sometimes aberrant and contradictory characters of data to be brought to light by research tools and by the implementation of semi-automated interactive procedures by which researchers qualify the value of the information. This aspect, a prerequisite for the project, will not be visible on this site. Next, we are in the process of creating a data visualization interface that will properly take into account the incomplete, uncertain or imprecise nature of the data, preventing erroneous conclusions during consultation. Finally, educational pathways and à la carte filters will allow different audiences to access the data according to their needs. Finally, a dedicated section will enable the youngest audience to familiarize themselves with specific historical realities through a playful approach.
Everything developed by PORTIC is of course shared under free software licenses.
médialab’s contribution: facilitation of three case studies
As part of PORTIC, Work Package No. 5 of this research programme consisted of conducting a series of case studies drawing on the two existing corpora of digitised historical sources, Navigocorpus and Toflit18, to build on the work already accomplished through an in-depth study of significant subsets of the data.
These studies shed new light on existing disciplinary questions thanks to the new materials and methods offered by the databases used by the programme. Such an initiative raises a number of questions:
- How can we combine two sources, some aspects of which are incommensurable or difficult to equate? How can we cross-reference the digitised data from the two databases with more detailed, qualitative knowledge of the phenomena under study, provided by historians who are specialists in the region in question?
- How can we take into account, at the time of investigation and reasoning, the significant stratification of transformations, reductions and interpretative decisions that constitute the chain of documentary operations linking the initial sources with the data extracted from them?
- How can we take into account the uncertainty or incompleteness of the data while offering a scientifically sound analysis of the phenomena under study?
- How can we bring together the classic forms of historical writing – the narrative unfolding sentence by sentence, the argument unfolding paragraph by paragraph – with the diagrammatic and computational forms of writing involved in the composition of a website?
- How can we manage the interdisciplinary collaboration and division of expertise involved in such multimodal writing?
All these questions were addressed during the collaborative process that led to the development of three experimental online publications offering targeted case studies that shed new light on issues relating to economic and maritime history. Each of these three publications was the result of several months or even years of work, combining periods of intensive work (datasprints) with periods of long-term work.
Coordinated by Robin de Mourat, the three case studies provided the opportunity for two six-month internships in research engineering for Cécile Asselin and Guillaume Brioudes. They also involved a large number of people who participated in one or more of the workshops and work sequences associated with the PORTIC case studies: Silvia Marzagalli, Christine Plumejeaud, Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin, Paul Girard, Maxime Zoffoli, Alain Bouju, Géraldine Geoffroy, Pauline Gourlet, Béatrice Mazoyer, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Guillaume Plique, Pierrick Pourchasse, Thierry Sauzeau, Héloïse Théro, Kelly Christensen, Hélène Herman, Christian Pfister-Langanay, Pierre-Niccolo Sofia.
Multi-scale trade around the port of La Rochelle in the 18th century, 2021
This case study focuses on navigation and maritime trade along the Poitou and Charente coasts on the eve of the Revolution. This corresponds to the direction of the farms of La Rochelle and the coastline of the provinces of Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge and Angoumois (the ‘PASA’ region).
It describes the history of the PASA region at the dawn of the French Revolution in three stages. First, we note the relative loss of importance and commercial diversity of the region following the loss of Canada by the Kingdom of France during the Seven Years' War.
We then offer a detailed analysis of the region's restructuring in relation to this event, according to specialised sectors that associate particular ports with the trade of specific products. Finally, we demonstrate that, although dominant in its region, the port of La Rochelle did not structure the region in 1789 in favour of a more diversified trade network.
Iframe https://www.youtube.com/embed/uxGqQkQ5DlU?si=zVV4WMEuEQJNyi-j
Trade, smuggling and free ports: the case of Dunkerque in the 18th century, 2024
Founded in the 12th century, Dunkerque has a long maritime tradition, and this case study sheds light on the issues at stake at the end of the 18th century, based on sources from navigocorpus and toflit18. First, we describe the institutional and fiscal aspects of the functioning of the port of Dunkerque at that time and present an overview of its maritime activities.
Secondly, we analyse more specifically the significant smuggling that took place there with England, both the sworn enemy of the Kingdom of France during what was known as the ‘Second Hundred Years' War’ and a close and dynamic economic partner.
Finally, we examine the nature of the Dunkerque warehouse's operations. Did it really act as an intermediary between the various European markets, as its merchants claimed? Or, as La Ferme and its competitors claimed, did it simply serve as a point of entry for goods smuggled into France?
Iframe https://www.youtube.com/embed/_sDyAtwQLVE?si=CO4cmdmG7SHWoAnK
Prosperity and resilience of the port of Marseille in the 18th century, 2024
While 18th-century France was characterised by the presence of several very active ports, only two successfully converted and prospered in the 19th century: Marseille and the Rouen-Le Havre complex. While the resilience of the Seine estuary can be explained primarily by the importance and dynamism of the Parisian economic and demographic basin, in the case of Marseille the causes are more complex.
This case study aims to elucidate the reasons for Marseille's resilience by exploring several explanatory hypotheses based on sources from toflit18 and navigocorpus.
Iframe https://www.youtube.com/embed/u7DX_83jr8E?si=kHC3G_U3omcSUNgK
The documentary: a scientific making-of to understand what is at stake in interdisciplinary research in practice
PORTIC is a flagship project in digital humanities and contemporary quantitative history. After years spent in the shadows of archives and the hell of databases, arguments are beginning to be produced, exploration tools developed, and visualisations created.
However, the use of graphics and statistics tends to give an impression of immediacy and obviousness, when in fact they are the result of a complex process and choices that are open to debate.
This tendency poses a double challenge: on the one hand, it requires that numbers and images be placed in context in order to be better understood and appropriated; on the other hand, it obscures the richness of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as the multiple—and sometimes unusual—practices and situations through which discoveries are made in these contexts.
Rather than producing a polished discourse and images, we therefore concluded the series of three PORTIC case studies with a document that opens the door to the ‘kitchen’ of digital humanities research. We therefore proposed a review of the programme's case studies from the point of view of their methodology and practical implementation, in the form of an audio-visual ‘scientific making-of’ of the last PORTIC case study. The aim was to show how interdisciplinary research in digital humanities can be conducted, from the initial preparatory meetings to the long tail of finishing a publication, including the decisive moments of face-to-face collaboration.
Iframe https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/mshs-sud-est/embed/153874?t=0