Habilitation Thesis (2011)
This document is entitled Towards a Phenomenology of Digital Inscriptions. Dynamics of Activity and Informational Structures in Interpretation Systems (Vers une phénoménologie des inscriptions numériques. Dynamique de l’activité et des structures informationnelles dans les systèmes d’interprétation). In the first chapter we first study the notion of inscription of knowledge as proposed by Bruno Bachimont. As we consider it is not sufficiently tied with human action and activity as considered by "post-cognitivist" theories, we propose to consider the notion of informational structures (structures informationnelles). Informational structures are digital inscriptions of knowledge that are actually manipulated by subjects during their computer-mediated activity, they can be canonical (explicitely manipulated by the system) or non canonical (but as such, they can become canonical if reified). The notion of informational structure is useful to study how digital inscriptions and activity are interwoven at different analysis levels, it is associated to the notion of information space that users enact during their activities, and enables to study at the individual level what could be called a phenomenology of digital inscriptions. In the second chapter of the document, we focus on explicit information spaces that users enact during knowledge work, and detail the notions of interpretation systems within which inscriptions of knowledge circulate. We present our work on video active reading and the Advene project. In the third chapter, we propose to define traces as inscriptions that are used during an activity as signs of the past, and we discuss the notion of interpretation systems that are dedicated to traces. We present our work on such systems, along firest the Musette (Modelling Users and Tasks to Traces Experience) approach and then the mTBS (Modelled Trace-Based systems) approach.
Examination committee : Nathalie Aussenac (referee), Bruno Bachimont (referee), Sylvie Leleu-Merviel (referee), Michel Beaudouin-Lafon (examiner), Catherine Garbay (examiner), Alain Mille (examiner), Pascal Salembier (examiner).
PhD Thesis (1999)
My PhD thesis was dedicated to audiovisual document representation for their use in audiovisual information systems. The document is entitled Representing video documents with annotation-interconnected strata for contextual exploitation (Représentation de documents audiovisuels en Strates-Interconnectées par les Annotations pour l'exploitation contextuelle). I proposed a model called Annotation Interconnected Strata (AI-Strata) and several model and concepts to exploit it with context in mind. I did also study current and futur use of audiovisual documents in the humanities.
Examination committee : Marie-France Bruandet (referee), Marc Nanard (referee), Bruno Bachimont (examiner), Françoise Chassaing (examiner), Alain Mille (co-supervisor), Jean-Marie Pinon (co-supervisor)
Master's Thesis (1995)
During my Master's Thesis, I studied structural linguistics toward the work of François Rastier about the interpretative semantics theory. The purpose of the work was to compare this theory (as expressed in Sémantique pour l'analyse, Masson, Paris, 1994 ; some ideas can be found in this article) and its main points (globality vs locality, notion of seme - both generic and specific -, semantic afference), to computer science, especially knowledge representation formalisms. The thesis is entitled Contribution to a clarification of the relations between interpretative semantic and informatics (Contribution à une clarification des rapports entre Informatique et Sémantique Interprétative).