This is a political, cultural, social, epistemological, and technical question. It stems from the research conducted by the Pasts in the Present Centre of Excellence (PP Labex), which has developed global scientific expertise in linking pasts, presents, and futures since its inception in 2012. The Centre is based in the digital humanities and the social sciences, but also benefits from the rare collections and documentary records of a wide network of major cultural partners and institutions.

The Pasts in the Present Centre is entirely interdisciplinary in nature. It adopts both a retrospective and prospective approach to social relations, drawing on comparatist and multilingual research across global geographies and temporalities stretching from the Prehistoric to the present day. It is hosted by the Universities of Paris Nanterre and Paris 8, and partners with the CNRS, the University of Paris Lumières (COMUE) and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Its network involves 5 major heritage organisations: the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the National Archives; The National Audiovisual Institute; the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum; and the National Archaeology Museum; while also being associated with the Louvre and the French Very Large Research Infrastructure ‘Huma-Num’. Bringing together 222 researchers, professors and lecturers, curators, documentalists and engineers, PP aims to transform research and teaching around pasts, presents, and futures, while fostering debates on today’s crucial international issues. Rooted in international, inter-institutional, and collaborative practice, the PP Centre prioritises the professionalization of students in the cultural sector (specialising in digital innovation, national heritage, and forecasting), and supports early career researchers in particular.

Thematically, Pasts in the present is tasked with addressing the question of memory in the broadest sense of the term, broaching it from an ecological, technological, historical and anthropological angle. Given that pasts and futures are composed of information and data that are forever changing and being re-articulated, the Centre wagers that the ‘past informs the future’ and thus its research espouses both historical studies and futurology.

As a Centre of Excellence that integrates new disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences with new cultural institutions, PP researchers are well positioned to innovate around several key themes: the ecology of memory in social environments (Memory of Spaces); our relationship to time, notably re-evaluating the linearity between the past, the present and the future as in fact more of a heterogenous relation (Experiences of Time); and the technological evolutions of our society, drawing on its expertise in the second generation of the digital humanities to develop new ways to capture, preserve, transmit, and question memory (Technologies of Memory). The Centre adopts an active approach to finding and mediating historical sources, using these to address questions of memory and heritage not as simple objects of the past, but rather as key resources for the future (Memories for the Future?).

This new programme thus closely ties looking backwards and forwards, in order to confront the technical, methodological and epistemological challenges of contemporary societies looking to deal with the past or imagine a possible future.