Foreword
We are very proud to publish studies that are the result of almost thirty years of hard work carried out by our colleagues of the UNINE – Université de Neuchâtel. The idea of publish the archives was first suggested to Professor Jean-Blaise Grize years before his death. Our goal was that of honoring him alive. However, this great communication, language and logic scholar left us, and we did not have the conditions to fulfill this dream. At that time, we also informed Professor Grize of our intention to launch a scientific society with the goal of keeping alive the legacy of the School of Neuchâtel, and to make its archives available to the public. He was moved to tears.
The digitization of the archives of the Semiological Research Center of the Université de Neuchâtel was coordinated by the Inter@ctiva team, at the Université de Montréal. We would like to thank, in Switzerland, the collaboration of Denis Miéville, head of the Centre and key person in the process. Professor Miéville articulated the gathering of the records that have been partially transferred to the Department of Communication of the Université de Montréal, in 2012. We would also like to thank Mrs. Catherine Gasser, who was our contact person at UNINE, as well as Mrs. Christiane Tripet, the SRC Publications Manager for decades. This publication is also a way of honoring Mrs. Tripet for her dedication and loyalty to UNINE’s CDR and Chair of Logic. At Inter@ctiva, in Montreal, we wish to thank the dedicated work of Ana Paula Burg, who scanned the documents. We also thank the members of the laboratory, from the universities of Montreal, Quebec at Montreal, Sherbrooke and Hearst, for their continued support and for the good advice coming out of our meetings. We have, after digitization, processed the files, prepared the web pages, and published the studies in Communalis web site.
Unfortunately, our work is not finished yet. Some exemplars of the “SRC Studies” and most “Logical Studies” are still missing. In order not to further delay the publication of these precious lost civilizations of knowledge, we decided to continue with the publication without renouncing the objective of completing the archives, in the future, with the missing exemplars. We also hope to improve, one day, the quality of the files and the ways to access them.
Given our limited financial resources – the research granting agencies in Canada do not fund this king of basic research preservation endeavours, and the Université de Neuchâtel decided not to fund the CdRS anymore – the published result has many limitations that, we hope, we will overcome in the future. Here are they:
- Our subscription with the company that hosts our site Communalis does not allow the downloading of large files. Thus, we decided to split them.
- The splitting of the files, contrary to what we could have done if we had resources, was made based on their size (each with a maximum of 2 megs) and not their internal organization (in sections, chapters, articles, etc.). The result, thus, is not optimal. We request our readers to forgive us for making the decision to divide the files "illogically" (at least, in terms of its semantic structure – what prevailed was the computer logic of maximum size for the uploading process).
- Most publications are authored single studies. In these cases, we only split the files, publishing them with simplified directions (part 1, part 2, etc.). However, when the publications were collections of articles written by different authors, we decided to provide additional page indication in order to make it easier for the readers to find the part (or parts) corresponding to the sought study.
- Finally, since the task of translating all texts in English was simply impossible, we have only translated the titles of the publications in the corresponding section.
We hope that this first initiative will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in discursive topics – argumentation, rhetoric, logic, semiology and semiotics. We hope that you enjoy your reading!
Milton N. Campos
Communalis Executive Director