The Chair in Digital Commons studies how freely accessible and reusable online resources such as Wikipedia are created, managed, and shared. Its goal is to better understand the political, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions that enable the development of digital commons within a globalized public sphere.
More specifically, the Chair focuses on linguistic and cultural plurality in these collaborative projects, where different groups negotiate their visions and practices. It also examines the impact of artificial intelligence, which relies heavily on large volumes of open data (texts, images, etc.) while simultaneously disrupting the models of digital commons.
Chairholder
Context
Digital commons refer to a mode of production, democratic governance, and open access to collective resources in the field of information and communication technologies. They include informational, educational, or cultural resources that are freely available online, as well as the technological infrastructures that support their creation and dissemination. Wikipedia is a flagship example, along with various free and open-source software projects. These commons are organized around a collectively produced and reusable resource, a community responsible for its management, and a set of governance rules established by that community. The Chair investigates their governance models: how they are produced, what worldview they convey, and who owns them.
Objectives
The Chair explores two complementary dimensions:
- Cultural pluralization of digital commons – examining the tensions between the perspectives of different linguistic and cultural groups involved in commons-based production collectives and the ensuing negotiations.
- Impact of artificial intelligence on digital commons – focusing on how open data corpora are created and used to train and improve AI systems, and how this affects the commons ecosystem.
Through an integrative and interdisciplinary approach, the Chair aims to strengthen the link between science and society by conducting collaborative research and research-creation projects with partners from the cultural and digital sectors.
Partners and Collaborators
Wikimédia Canada, Wikimédia France, Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Bibliothèque nationale de France