The search for “Cowboys Fringants” on the scholarly site Érudit leads to the article “Critical, cynical cowboy!” » published in spring 2005 by Backlight. Issue 6 of the literary review focuses on the theme “A generation, what generation?” “. The text published two decades ago, well before the deluge of tributes and pop exegeses following the death of singer Karl Tremblay, reminds us to what extent the very observant Mathieu Arsenault knows how to lucidly and directly grasp contemporary Quebec.
His essay in I begins with the description of a concert in a Montreal park. When the crowd sings without fervor the refrain of At half-mast from the album Union break (“If this is modern Quebec / Well, I put my flag at half-mast…”), the engaged spectator contemplates his generation “in meditation on its own image”. He notes that he only saw this troubled, ironic, cynical and unhappy self-consciousness one other time (“Hegel in Repentigny”, says an intertitle), at the time when Mononc’Serge himself had interpreted his tune I sing for morons in front of an audience of punk and metalheads…
The analysis then focuses on the existential anxieties of the suburban homo consumericus developed in the repertoire of Cowboys Fringants until recently. “Farthest from nostalgia, the reminder of BMX bikes, fluorescent laundry and obscure hockey players aims less to immerse oneself in this period, altogether insignificant, than to enter into a non-commercial relationship at this time,” writes the cultural critic Arsenault. Well done !
This is also what erudit.org can be used for for everyone and not just for academics: to unearth pearls to shed light on the times. “Our scientific dissemination platform, especially in Quebec literature and human sciences, aims to make knowledge freely accessible in French,” summarizes philosopher Frédéric Bouchard, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montreal. (UdeM), chairman of the board of directors of the formidable digital educational machine.
The site is celebrating its 25th this week.e founding anniversary by organizing a conference (obviously) on scholarly publishing. “From the start, the objective was to ensure that Quebec magazines had the same influence in the world as the major private English-language magazines,” adds the president.
A digital vision
The platform was born in 1998 at UdeM, which still hosts it. “It was truly visionary,” continues Mr. Bouchard. This was before the BlackBerry was even born. The founders saw before others that the future of the dissemination of knowledge would be digital and free. They also understood that if research in the humanities and social sciences in French did not equip itself with its own tools, it would be completely eclipsed by other disciplines and other languages. The homogenization of knowledge is in no one’s interest. »
It was truly visionary. This was before the BlackBerry was even born. The founders saw before others that the future of the dissemination of knowledge would be digital and free.
The digitization of the first retrospective collections began in 1999. University libraries quickly supported the change and very quickly the research and innovation granting organizations supported the project. Two other universities (Laval University and UQAM) have joined the consortium with an annual budget of more than $4 million, half of which is paid in royalties to publications. In general, documents are available online free of charge as soon as they appear in review and a maximum of one year after their first release. “As soon as it exists, it’s online,” summarizes the president.
The cyberinfrastructure serving open science now offers 322 journals and more than 235,000 articles. 10,000 are added per year in a sector where extensive digitization is moving further and further away from paper publishing. By comparison, the French site OpenEdition offers around 600 journals and 1.2 million documents.
“It’s not just a question of numbers,” said the professor. Quebec and Canada now exercise leadership in the world. We are in contact with Brazilians and Germans who face the same challenges. I want to say that the success of Érudit is disproportionate to the weight of Quebec. Despite our small population, we find ourselves at the heart of open science discussions around the world. »
Soft sciences that last
Approximately 40 million Érudit pages are consulted each year by more than 5.4 million unique visitors. Connections are made three times out of four from outside Canada, led by France, the United States, Germany, Morocco, Belgium, Cameroon and Ivory Coast. Since 2018, Érudit has also developed a partnership with Wikipedia to offer free access to Quebec scholarly journals as sources for the encyclopedia’s articles.
The great deal also has its importance in the context of tensions around so-called soft sciences. “Enrollment in the humanities is plummeting at colleges across the country,” headlined in February The New Yorker. The incessant ideological struggles on campus (restarted with the Hamas-Israel conflict) and the increasing cost of studies partly explain this disaffection, while developing crises (such as the disappearance of an emblematic artist) seem on the contrary require more and more insight from disciplines in the human and social sciences, law or the arts.
The dean, himself a philosopher of science, concludes by giving a concrete example of Quebec research on academic perseverance. “It’s good that French-speaking secondary school teachers can read research results in English. But it’s even better if they can read them in their language by consulting studies carried out here. It is even more important in social sciences, education or literature. A neutrino in physics, it is the same in Portuguese and in English. On the other hand, the reality of dropping out of school is not the same here as in Brazil or the United States. »