Foucault's Reading Notes – FFL

The Foucault’s Reading Notes project (FFL) aims at investigating and displaying an important part of Foucault’s reading notes that are preserved at the French National Library. This corpus, of many thousand pages, holds a substantial collection of citations and references, written, organized and annotated by Michel Foucault for the writing of his books and courses.

Our aim is not only to give access to the philosopher’s reading material but also to contribute to the elaboration of a philosophical hermeneutic approach, drawing on the analysis of documentary practices and of Foucault’s styles of work. The Foucaldian research will be deeply renewed by this project, thank to the multiplicity of exploration perspectives offered by the Foucault’s collection recently acquired by the French National Library (BnF). Furthermore, Human Sciences themselves will benefit from a rare and unpublished corpus, dealing with various issues such as penalty, psychiatry and sexuality.

In addition to this contribution to Human Sciences, we will focus on developing an innovative digital platform relying on Foucault’s own theory on the materiality of discourse and archives – theory to which the reading notes will offer a new approach. The innovative platform will allow the user to circulate through contents, to show and analyse their relationships and to enrich them by adding annotations or remote resources.

The team will propose an open and original data model specifically based on linked data technologie that every researcher would be able to adapt to his own problematic. For instance this model will enable the user to create his own model of documents description and of knowledge and contents relationships and interrogation. Instead of giving access to the archives according to a unique and predefined model of what relevant information should be, the user will be able to constitute and organise his own indicators and his own reading process. The main challenge will be to integrate theses different analytic modes and functionalities to a platform where all contributions will be aggregated and articulated during the funding period and beyond.