Elie Dannaoui

Since the early 90's, the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) has been trying to establish standards for encoding transcriptions. TEI uses XML (extensible markup language) as technology which employs tags to represents the elements that define the text. The approach is based on hierarchical, nested and structured representation of elements. TEI header contains the information describing the whole document. Most digital humanists have found that XML is easy to learn, human readable and interoperable. Even though, they are still facing some constraints: the lack of a user friendly editing and publishing environment, open tools limitation, the demand for an easy to learn and human readable language with a small learning curve, the need of a full markup text, the need of a fully searchable text, the flexibility to integrate new features (geospatial, ocr, analysis...), the interoperability, the heterogeneous form of documents, and the need of a validator and a place to store and manage the documents and information. Our proposed solution consists of developing a simple user-friendly environment for editing and publishing the digital scholarly editions and to respond to all those constraints. The platform offers a simple lightweight interface for creating dynamic forms for handling heterogeneous source of text and data. This paper presents the new approach based on a comprehensive analysis of the current practices and technologies related to digital scholarly editions. It is organized as follows: 1-Introduction about digital scholarly editions and digital publishing, and a literature review to define the use of TEI for standardization and exchangeable content, 2-Methodology based on a discussion of the current constraints stated on the Digital Scholarly Editions workshop, in the Orient Institute in Beirut, "Establishing a framework for scholarly editing and publishing in the 21st century Workshop", 3-Presentation of our solution based on the latest technologies and trends in web, followed by the platform prototype, 4-Conclusion with a recommendation for further development.

Conçu pour la pédagogie scolaire, le mouvement Freinet se définit comme faisant partie de « l’école moderne » dans sa façon de voir la personne de l’apprenant d’une part et dans sa conception de la relation dynamique entre la praxis et l’appropriation de la connaissance. A l’origine l’approche Freinet s’est située plus dans une dynamique pragmatique que dans une dynamique théorique. Les pédagogues ont « récupéré » les résultats de ce qui commencera à être appelé la « Pédagogie Freinet » pour essayer de la lier à l’évolution des sciences de l’éducation et particulièrement des acquis de la psychologie cognitive.

Depuis quelques années la notion de « compétence » a fait son apparition dans la littérature pédagogique. Sous la pression du monde du travail l’acquisition des compétences est devenue un must et la pédagogie dite « approche par compétences » a commencé à voir le jour, avec tout ce qui peut accompagner cette innovation comme écueils. Le monde universitaire se penche actuellement sur cette approche et depuis le processus de Bologne, essaie de recadrer ses formations sur ce que cette approche peut apporter de nouveau dans le cadre de la personnalisation des formations et de complémentarité incontournable entre  l’expérience et les acquis de l’apprentissage.

Cette intervention se propose de montrer que l’approche par compétences s’apparente à la Pédagogie de Freinet ce qui aidera à affirmer que cette dernière est bien un système qui dans son essence dépasse la formation scolaire pour se placer au niveau des composantes de base de toute formation à n’importe quel niveau soit-elle. Elle établira les aspects de parenté entre ces deux pédagogies au niveau des finalités, puis fera le parallèle entre les pratiques qu’elles adoptent dans ce qu’elles ont de commun ou de différent. Elle finira par étudier les défis auxquels ces deux approches ont à faire face.
Ceci nous permettra de voir l’aspect systémique de ces deux pédagogies, la continuité et la complémentarité qu’elles offrent au monde pédagogique. Ceci aidera à nous projeter dans le futur afin que les planifications pédagogiques puissent bâtir sur tous ces acquis et jouer un rôle proactif au niveau sociétal.
L’hypothèse de cette intervention est que, potentiellement, la conjugaison de ces deux systèmes aidera à relever plusieurs défis sociétaux car elle permettra de résoudre les problèmes pédagogiques à leur base et dans un souci d’intégrité interne, d’intégralité externe et de continuité.

Cloud computing is a trend phenomenon in the online education world. It might advance learning and teaching techniques and methods with a creative collaborative virtual environment. It is a state of art internet technology that offers the user the availability of resources and services in a non spatio-temporal dependency which provides an access to large storage space and wide selection of services (Social Media, Email, Web Apps, Office suite…). Cloud computing has a prodigious potential for creating large accessible, flexible and interoperable networked environment that grants remarkable added value features to the Electronic Education (E-ducation).
The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a semi-autonomous networked learning environment, distributed on the cloud, in which open resources were produced and shared by participants worldwide. This technology was the latest innovation in the last few years. Different platforms were developed by several non-profit providers (edX, Coursera, Udacity, etc...) and supported by the world’s most prestigious universities and institution such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc…
Those platforms are used by millions of students around the globe. This successful innovation so far has helped the development of E-ducation. This notion yields us to start thinking of extending this innovation approach to improve research in E-ducation. This could be an online platform for research which in return could push the development of online research worldwide and increase the collaboration between universities and institutions. The platform, defined as a Massive Open Online Research (MOOR), consists of a rich online open environment for research with unlimited user participation.

ABSTRACT A corpus (plural corpora) is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research (statistical analysis, hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules within a specific language territory…). This paper highlights the difficulties related to building corpora using heterogeneous textual sources and suggests an adequate solution. The textual transmission of a written work may contain various types of sources (manuscripts, printed, citations, allusions…). This diversity in terms of media and forms creates a major difficulty in the process of building the corpus because it requires that all these types to be predefined previously. This operation gets more complicated when the text is a translation from another language. The main obstacle in studying the history of such texts is their heterogeneous aspect. This is due to many elements: the wide spectrum of translation dates, the different vorlagen of the translations and their lingual origins, the plurality in terms of compilations and forms. To achieve these objectives, the project will proceed in the following way: • Collecting digital copies of all known textual testimonies. • Building a digital corpus containing the transcriptions of the identified texts. • Defining types and techniques of analysis that will be performed on the corpus contents. • Designing, developing and implementing appropriate tools for textual analysis. The text may be present in two formats: • Explicit (direct): This format includes the text as the author wrote it. • Implicit (indirect): This format includes allusions to the text or contents in different types of writings. These allusions are witnesses of a certain version of the text and may contribute in identifying this tradition if they were formally presented and integrated in the corpus. Both explicit and implicit formats of text will be consolidated in the corpus by a formal taxonomy. This approach will allow the corpus, when queried, to return all the occurrences of a specific textual occurrence regardless of its format or type. Taking into consideration the diversity and the heterogeneity of these sources, the main challenge was to conceive a database capable of handling and consolidating these different types of content. Traditionally, relational databases are used in similar projects and the main issue for decision makers was mainly to select the appropriate relational database to use. In our project, we decided to go in the opposite direction. Instead of a well­designed relational database schema, we decided to use an unstructured database. This family of databases also known, NoSQL is non­relational, distributed, open­source and horizontally scalable. Its schema­free approach will enable us to anticipate the emergence of new text formats and will allow the corpus to host different types of texts. This approach will guarantee the following properties: • Data has a flexible schema. Corpus does not enforce document structure. This means that transcribed texts in the corpus do not need to have the same set of fields or structure, and common fields in corpus's documents may hold different types of data. • One of the most important advantages of this technological approach is the shift from developer­centered to user­centered application. In Relational Database Management Systems, the load is put on the back­end operations (analysis, design, development, programming…). The end user (the researcher in our case) is a consumer of the system and any modification on the level of data structure requires an intervention at the back­end, and affects the front­end on several levels. Our approach gives the user the possibility to interact with the platform not only on the client side, but allows the scholar for example to define a new document type, populate it with appropriate existing fields or even add new fields. Data integrity is guaranteed by a set of validation schemes. • The platform supports indexes on any field or sub­field contained in documents within the corpus. This allows the scholar to locate word occurrences in all the transcribed texts of the corpus.

Using NoSQL databases for building heterogeneous annotated corpora.