"Pour comprendre la mer, il faut aller voir."
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
From Underwater Heritage to the Digital Humanities
When André Malraux created the Direction des recherches archéologiques sous-marines in 1966 the predecessor of today’s Department of Underwater Archaeological Research (DRASSM) he helped secure institutional recognition for a discipline that was still in its infancy. France thus established a dedicated public service for the study, protection and promotion of underwater cultural heritage.
Now, this history is one of the points of convergence between my research and the Amitiés Internationales André Malraux. It also raises a question that runs through my entire career : how do technological innovations transform the way we discover, document, understand and transmit heritage?
A Data and AI engineer, art historian and archaeologist by training with expertise in digital humanities and data, I have spent several years developing a career at the intersection of historical research, cultural heritage, data science and artificial intelligence.
Reconstructing the History of Underwater Archaeology
Since 2022, I have been pursuing a PhD at the École Pratique des Hautes Études - PSL, within the ANHIMA research centre. My doctoral research examines the emergence of underwater archaeology and the formation of the discipline between 1875 and 1980, with particular attention to the Mediterranean region.
My research focuses on the women and men who took part in this scientific endeavour, as well as on the institutions, technologies, international networks and intellectual transformations that gradually turned shipwreck exploration from a pioneering activity into a fully fledged archaeological discipline.
This work draws on public and private archives, the study of documentary corpora, oral-history interviews with people involved in the development of the discipline, and the creation of new research datasets. It combines historiography with computational methods in order to explore what digital tools and artificial intelligence can contribute to the analysis of complex heritage corpora.
The project also has a strong international dimension. My PhD is jointly supervised by EPHE-PSL and the University of Haifa and is part of a scientific collaboration with the European ERC SHIPS project. It also contributes to the preparation of the international conference “Underwater Archaeology after the Pioneers”, to be held in Paris in June 2027, bringing together researchers, heritage institutions and professionals from several countries to discuss the history and future of the discipline.
Experience Built at the Heart of Heritage Institutions
Before and alongside my doctoral research, I worked for more than ten years in a range of cultural, scientific and administrative institutions, including the Louvre Museum, DRASSM, the French Ministry of Culture and the Conseil d’État.
At DRASSM, I worked in particular on documentary databases and on the use of photogrammetric data relating to archaeological shipwrecks in the Marseille area. At the Louvre Museum, I contributed to collection inventory, stocktaking, digitisation and documentation programmes. At the French Ministry of Culture, I also worked on structuring and standardising large corpora of digital heritage archives.
These experiences have given me an understanding of heritage at several levels: archaeological fieldwork, collections, archives, information systems and, today, the digital data that connects them.
Data and Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the Humanities and Engineering
My second field of activity focuses specifically on data, information systems and artificial intelligence.
Trained in digital humanities at the École Normale Supérieure and in digital technologies applied to history at the École Nationale des Chartes, I now teach in higher education on topics relating to data, artificial intelligence, modelling and digital transformation.
My work includes the collection and structuring of heterogeneous data, data standardisation and interoperability, georeferenced data and GIS, data visualisation, documentary standards, and the use of AI tools to analyse textual and visual sources.
This dual background enables me to build bridges between professional communities that still interact too rarely: researchers, engineers, IT specialists, archaeologists, archivists, heritage institutions and data specialists.
It also opens up perspectives on the technologies used to explore and document the underwater world: large-scale data acquisition, computer vision, photogrammetry, mapping, autonomous systems and robotics. In these environments, technology is not an end in itself; it becomes a means of reaching difficult-to-access spaces, generating new knowledge and preserving fragile traces of the past.
Connecting Heritage, Research and Innovation
My career has therefore developed around a common thread: data as a trace of the past and as raw material for knowledge.
An archive, an old photograph, the geographical position of a shipwreck, a photogrammetric model, a heritage inventory or a corpus of several thousand documents ultimately raise the same question: how can a mass of information be transformed into knowledge that is intelligible, verifiable and transmissible?
It is within this space that I intend to continue my research and develop new collaborations, with universities, museums and heritage institutions, as well as with companies and engineering teams working in data, artificial intelligence, computer vision or robotics.
More than half a century after André Malraux created the first French service dedicated to underwater archaeology, the marine environment remains an extraordinary field for scientific innovation. Divers and the earliest survey techniques have since been joined by photogrammetry, geographic information systems, robotic vehicles, digital imaging and artificial intelligence.
Yet the underlying challenge remains profoundly Malrauxian: to make accessible works, remains and knowledge that distance, time or depth once seemed to place beyond our reach, and to transmit them to future generations.