NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
La genèse et le développement des partis politiques au Bas-Canada (1791-1840)

This thesis investigates the development of political parties and the origin of party loyalty in the legislative Assembly in Lower-Canada between 1791 and 1840. To do so, this thesis conducts a systemic analysis of the legislative behaviour of the Members of Parliament (MPs) with the loyalty index and the Optimal classification developed by Poole (2005). It demonstrates that language is the most salient issue of division among MPs in the first Parliaments, and that constitutional issues (reformists against conservatives) are the primary causes of conflict in the two last Parliaments. Moreover, we found that there is no clear divide between MPs according to their social status, the type of district in which they are elected, their occupation or their parliamentary experience. Finally, we also hypothesize that Members of Parliament do not tend to organize along party lines; instead they vote according to their individual preferences.

Keyphrases: Lower-Canada, Political institutions, Legislative Assembly, Political parties, Legislative behaviour
A Mono- and Multi-objective Approach for Recommending Software Refactoring

Software systems have become prevalent and important in our society. There is a constant need for high-quality software. Hence, to improve software quality, one of the most-used techniques is the refactoring which improves design structure while preserving the external behavior. Refactoring has promised, if applied well, to improve software readability, maintainability and extendibility while increasing the speed at which programmers can write and maintain their code. In general, refactoring can be performed in various levels such as the requirement, design, or code level. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the source code level where automated refactoring recommendation can be performed through two main steps: 1) detection of code fragments that need to be improved/fixed (e.g., code-smells), and 2) identification of refactoring solutions to achieve this goal.  For the code-smells identification step, we translate regularities that can be found in such code-smell examples into detection rules. To this end, we use genetic programming to automatically generate detection rules from examples of code-smells. For the refactoring identification step, a search-based approach is used. The process aims at finding the optimal sequence of refactoring operations that improve software quality by minimizing the number of detected code-smells while prioritizing the most critical ones. In addition, we explore other objectives to optimize using a multi-objective approach: the code changes needed to apply refactorings, semantics preservation, and the consistency with development change history. Hence, reducing code changes allows us to keep as much as possible the initial design. On the other hand, semantics preservation insures that the refactored program is semantically coherent, and that it models correctly the domain-semantics. Indeed, we use knowledge from historical code change to suggest new refactorings in similar contexts. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multi-objective approach to improve software quality attributes (i.e., flexibility, maintainability, etc.), fix “bad” design practices (i.e., code-smells) while promoting “good” design practices (i.e., design patterns).

Keyphrases: Search-based Software Engineering, Software Maintenance, Code-smells, Refactoring
Wenn individuelle Zweisprachigkeit kollektive Sprachkonflikte löst
Sprachgrenze und Identitätsdiskurse in Fribourg/Freiburg (CH) : die Sicht junger bilingualer Erwachsener

When individual bilingualism solves collective language conflicts Language frontier and identity discourse in Fribourg/Freiburg: the perspective of young bilingual adults  This thesis deals with the Fribourg/Freiburg (Switzerland) language question and examines the significance of language for the cohabitation in Fribourg as well as it looks into fields of conflict for the language groups, the influence of language on the construction of a (collective) identity and the role of language as a criterion to make a distinction between German and French Swiss. Therefore, firstly, a discourse analysis was carried out to investigate a debate lasting four years that took place in the local newspapers La Liberté and Freiburger Nachrichten concerning a new cantonal constitution, to find out about the different positions in the Fribourg language question and to set the context and backdrop of this thesis. Secondly, 17 interviews with a total of 18 young bilingual (French/German) Fribourg adults have been executed, to take a new perspective on the Fribourg language question.     The discourse analysis made varying perceptions of collective identity in the city apparent that are often language group related. The latter expressed itself in a primarily French Fribourg perception of a francophone city with a German speaking minority and a principally German Fribourg perception of a traditionally bilingual city thus creating two camps: one camp wishes for a (bilingual) collective identity, which includes the respective alterity, whereas the other camp tries to reinforce their identity by stressing the alterity and simultaneously rather excludes common grounds with the other camp.  The interviews show that the language is the principal criterion to make a distinction between German and French Fribourg inhabitants – ranging before other criteria such as norms and values, mentalities, religion, ways of living or culture. The bilingual and mostly bicultural interviewees reveal a specific perception and attitude: in contrast to the results of the discourse analysis they integrate both camps in their personality, and also have a feeling of belonging with German and French Fribourg and are thus resolving most of the conflict points and contradictions in the Fribourg language question. This makes them mediators between the language groups in the bridge canton and poses potentially uncomfortable questions to the social actors involved in the Fribourg language debate.

Keyphrases: Fribourg, identity, language conflicts, language identity, language frontier, Fribourg, Switzerland, biculturalism, Fribourg language question, bilingualism
Les tendances commémoratives contemporaines à travers l’évolution des monuments aux morts en Occident

This thesis proposes a study of thematic, formal structural and functional features of twentieth century commemorative monuments. Based on a specific corpus of exemplary and illustrative works about the contemporary trend of representation, our research will focus on the ideological transformation of commemoration in the Western world. During the last century, a shift from the celebration of victory to the commemoration of tragedies related to international conflicts has been observed. In a first instance, an analysis will be developed around works made by artists whose task was to maintain and crystallize collective memory. The works studied will cover the period from Antiquity to World War One. Then, using as case studies James E. Young’s works, we will study the new perspectives that appeared at the beginning of the 1980s. This period has witnessed a transition from the concept of counter-monument to the monument-musée, which offers an answer to the representative crisis caused by the tragic events of the last century.

Keyphrases: Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz, Commemorative monuments, Cult of the dead, Counter-monument, Occidental culture
Le partage de photographies sur Facebook : s’écrire, esthétiser sa vie

Since Facebook was first launched, in 2004, the social network has received a tremendous amount of media coverage. Today, as users are counted by millions, Facebook now seems to have become, in certain circles, totally ubiquitous. Despite growing numbers of warnings for caution in the uses of Facebook – which are frequently associated to privacy or surveillance issues – many users keep uploading content, such as personal photographs, on the social network. This thesis aims to explore the extent to which practices of personal photography may be involved in the formations of what Michel Foucault termed "ethics of the self" (Foucault, 1984a; 1984b). These ethics provide individuals with values, guidelines and codes of conduct from which the subject can engage in the production of his self as an "ethic" being, living an "aesthetic" life (idem). Research was supported with a series of interviews conducted with three volunteers. In the light of their photographic practices, I assert that it is possible to understand personal photography as a fertile site where techniques of the self can be made and elaborated. I suggest that through personal photography, these processes encourage the production of a united and consistent subject, and that these practices also contribute to the aestheticisation of the subject as well as its existence.

Keyphrases: Facebook, Photography, Power, Apparatus, Ethics of the self, Technologies of self, Practices, Visibility, Subject
Danser au monde : étude du mouvement dans l'espace textuel de Marguerite Duras

Few studies have been undertaken on movement in the work of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). Yet, the rewritings and repetitions that mark her scripturary practice allow for the thinking of displacements, metamorphoses that the present thesis proposes to read in the company of such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, and in a more spectral, but no less essential way, Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévesque and Maurice Blanchot. The first chapter is interested in “the dancing-walk of the beggarwoman”, which takes place in Le Vice-consul (1966). The movement of loss in the beggarwoman proposes itself as a process of endless deterritorialization in which metamorphoses and becomings are ceaselessly operative. The latter draws into its rhizome places in which having an experience of the visible is isolatable with difficulty from its invisible doubling. Places are thus “created” to make of the “danced place a dancing space” (Chapter 2). It would not, however, be possible to account for movement without questioning “the rhythms of dance” (Chapter 3), the ordeal of which possesses a metamorphosizing power, and is particularly sensible in L’Après-midi de monsieur Andesmas (1962). But rhythm is also that through which time is opened. And Durassian time plunges her reader as well as her characters into a universe in which the virtual and the actual tirelessly exchange forces. Thus does the question of the event, of its possibility in encounter and crime, which is the object of “time parted by dance” (Chapter 4). The depository of a strange hiatus aroused  such that a distance can be excavated in order to speak the event, this work dreams, finally, through language, of the unseparated event in the perpetual movement of sense, in “the dance of sense” (Chapter 5). Nonetheless, if sense can first appear to be dancing because it is unstable, it must be recognized that one is always turning around certain words that escape. Something will always escape. That is what the sixth chapter, “Dance’s échappé(e),” apprehends, when movement, which has no finality other than itself, inscribes a perpetual incompletion to which the rewritings testify. Because she stages beings in movement in a work itself in movement, Marguerite Duras’s œuvre enables one to think the being-in-the-world as a dancer.

Keyphrases: Marguerite Duras, Rhizome, Crime, Sens, Movement, Dance, Being-in-the-world, Deterritorialization, Event, Rhythm, Sense
Analyse des représentations et des enjeux de pouvoir produisant la personnalité publique politique célèbre au Québec : le cas de Justin Trudeau

This master’s thesis aims to understand how, by the representation of politicians as public individual celebrities, arise power issues. The analysis of recurrence patterns and particularities of those representations, which circulate through discourse, enable a better understanding of how power is exercised by, among other things, naturalization. This research is supported by Hall’s (1997) concept of representation and Foucault’s definition of power. The case of Justin Trudeau, object of celebrity discourses produced through media discourse at the time of the Liberal Party of Canada Leadership contest, was a prolific ground for analysis. Firstly, existing and circulating representations by media texts producing diverse significations are discursively analysed. Secondly, the analysis is concerned with knowledge these representations participate to produce and with power effects they induce. It is then possible to understand that representations which produce today’s celebrity politician are organised by filiation which proceed through biographisation and heteronormativity.

Keyphrases: Filiation, Biographisation, Justin Trudeau, Representations, Power, Celebrity, Heteronormativity, Discourse analysis, Medias, Politic
Le journaliste dans le processus de recherche d'information sur le Web

This submission seeks to understand and identify the link between the strategies used to search information by the journalist on the web and the demands of his profession. It aims to understand the precautions taken by the journalist in his search for information on the web to respect the constraints imposed by the rules of his profession to insure the quality of information sources. We examined this issue through an investigation of the experience of Journalists at Radio-Canada’s. So we met some of the journalists of this media. These were observed in situations of information retrieval and questioned about their experience on search for information sources..  Internet and the technological revolution have deeply upset the journalistic practices. The search for information is an important area of this change in practices. This transformation leads mainly to questions on how the new way to search information sources affect the journalist's work, especially the factors that way the journalist resists to traps consubstantial to the new working methods he has to develop.

Keyphrases: Information, Web, Internet, Source, Radio-Canada, Information-Communication, Public, Journalist, Research
Exploring geolocation governance perspectives through the study of appropriation and collective action

This master’s thesis was started to explore an inequality. An inequality in the way users  of mobile web services hand over data, and an inequality in the way this data are exploited. As it becomes commonplace for web companies to exploit their users’ data to  improve their services or generate advertising revenue, the public domain is left in the  dark, with little data to work with to improve public services. Notably, as cities are  increasingly striving to become ‘smart’, a lack of data and ethical ways in which to  exploit what little data exists is becoming increasingly problematic. How can a city create  georeferenced data to improve its infrastructures? How can this data be exploited whilst  respecting citizens’ privacy and security? Through a comparative study of the use of  OpenStreetMap (OSM), an open-source mapping platform, and Google Maps, we have aimed to understand possible future uses of GPS technologies by government bodies.  Through a series of interviews with OSM and Google Maps users, we have apprehended why users choose to use and contribute to a platform, and not to another. Using the  concepts of appropriation and collective action, as well as critical perspectives from the  study of immaterial capitalism, this data was then analyzed. This enabled us to  understand the underlying issues behind use and contribution practices in the GIS sector. This understanding was then recontextualized in order to understand what government bodies could do to create ethical smart cities that take into consideration the preferences  and concerns of the citizens these cities are increasingly designed to serve.

Keyphrases: GIS, OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, appropriation, governance, Collective Action, Montreal, smart city
Le dialogue herméneutique et ses sources platoniciennes : étude sur la place de Platon dans l'herméneutique de Gadamer

Known above all to have raised hermeneutics in the foreground of contemporary philosophy, H.-G. Gadamer is also renowned for his original contributions to the history of ideas, notably because of his characteristic reading of Plato. However, a question arises: are these two distinct parts of his thought, with his philosophical hermeneutics on the one hand and his exegesis of Plato on the other? Or are they the two facets of a same project, two perspectives on a same philosophical object? Our study aims to defend this second option. In the first place, we present, in light of Gadamer’s reading of Plato, the reasons why in Truth and Method Gadamer develops his own idea of hermeneutical dialogue in reference to Plato’s dialectic. Then we will show how the hermeneutical ontology sketched in the last chapter of Truth and Method remains strongly related to Gadamer’s general reading of Plato, even if Gadamer refuses the instrumentalism of language that he finds in Plato’s thought.

Keyphrases: Gadamer, Philosophy, Hermeneutics, Ontology, Dialectic, Gadamer, Plato
Études des notions de compétition et de coopération dans l'oeuvre de Charles Darwin

In the field of contemporary biology, growing attention is being paid to positive biological associations, such as symbiosis, which seem to qualify the traditional view of evolution as a “competitive” process. In tandem with researchers’ current enthusiasm for biological cooperation, this thesis aims to extend historical research concerning the integration of such phenomena in the works of Charles Darwin. More precisely, we wish to examine how Darwin was able to articulate the competitive component of evolution by natural selection with the existence of cooperative phenomena. Thus, the first part of this thesis will deal with the concept of Darwinian competition and its theoretical link with natural selection. The second part will concern the integration of biological cooperation into the theory. By these two steps, we wish to show that Darwin manages to reconcile competitive interactions with the existence of cooperative associations, yet without contradicting the theoretical principles underlying the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Keyphrases: Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, Descent of man, Philosophy of biology, Competition, Cooperation
Quel sens faut-il donner à l’universalité de l’herméneutique chez Gadamer? : sa légitimité face aux critiques de Jürgen Habermas

The historical distance that separates us from the publication of Truth and Method allows a better understanding of the universal aspect of hermeneutics defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and which sparked so much debate immediately after the publication of his book. The hermeneut has indeed had the opportunity, in several texts he has written over the past decades, to specify his conception and better establish this universality, particularly by associating it with the universality of rhetoric itself. A survey of the various debates surrounding this universality claim of hermeneutics also helps to get a better picture of what is at stake. This essay looks at the meaning of universality of hermeneutics by considering the decisive sections of Truth and Method devoted to it, the later writings of Gadamer on the issue and the secondary literature to see if this claim to universality can be upheld against the criticism raised by Jürgen Habermas. We will argue in this paper that this is the case, but also that Habermas's criticism has helped Gadamer to better formulate and defend the universality of hermeneutics. It is precisely by taking into account the contribution of those who think differently that this universality of hermeneutics is demonstrated.

Keyphrases: Gadamer, Habermas, Hermeneutic, Rhetoric, Language, Understanding
La négativité en litige : Heidegger, Hegel et l’origine de la négation dialectique

In this thesis we explore Heidegger’s patient engagement (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel about the origin of negativity – an inescapable problem insofar as it is “the sole thought of a thinking that asks the question of Being”.  We begin by noting an unsuspected affinity between the two thinkers with respect to the privileged role that negation must play in philosophy, and from there we elucidate the motives for why Heidegger nevertheless rejects the dialectical method of his toughest adversary.  Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel evolved constantly over his entire oeuvre; in order to do it justice we therefore propose a chronology that delimits its four principal stages.  I. Firstly, we examine the young Heidegger’s resolute opposition to the rise of Neo-Hegelianism in the name of a very personal appropriation of Husserl’s intuitionism. The modifications that Heidegger made to his master’s phenomenological method nevertheless reveal that he also surreptitiously borrowed from Hegelian dialectic, the principal merit of which was to have granted negation a positive function.  II. Being and Time does not openly declare this methodological debt, yet traces of it can be found, notably in the form of a counter-falling negation that plays a marked and essential role in the existential analytic.  A disagreement remained between Heidegger and his predecessor as to the ontological origin of nothingness, which seemed to elude any form of dialectical sublation.  III. The problem of the origin of the negative, far from having been definitively settled, then resurged at the heart of a new conception of metaphysics within the Heideggerian project, perhaps even undermining its very foundations.  Heidegger vied with Hegel for a more originary understanding of nothingness, one which he conceived as a testament to the finitude of Being itself and as opposed to the specifically Hegelian accomplishment of metaphysics.  IV. However, the tensions inherent to this delicate enterprise led him to go beyond onto-theo-logy together with the technical completion that Hegel had envisioned for it.  From then on, Heidegger sought to situate the abyssal origin of the negative in an irreducible refusal of Being – over against the nihilistic forgetfulness to which Hegel had confined it by having resorbed it into the absolute positivity of presence.  In so doing Heidegger proposed a concept of negation that he deemed more originary than its dialectical counterpart, construing negation as an interrogative answer, patient and attentive to the hesitant refusal of the event (Ereignis).  But can it ultimately be maintained that Heidegger thereby succeeded in freeing himself, once and for all, from the dialectical troubles that seemingly clung to his thought and from which he constantly strove to distance himself?  The present thesis will contribute to settling this very question.

Keyphrases: Martin Heidegger, G.W.F. Hegel, Finitude, negativity, dialectic, nothingness, metaphysics, temporality, phenomenology