Re-imagining French lexicography: The dictionnaire vivant de la langue française

The Dictionnaire vivant de la langue française (DVLF), developed by The ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, represents an experimental, interactive, and community-based approach to French lexicography. The DVLF enables broad public access to a wide variety of linguistic tools and resources, with the goal of changing user interaction with dictionaries and providing better descriptions of emergent word use. In this article we describe the history of the DVLF and provide a survey of similar community-oriented electronic dictionaries. We then proceed to a presentation of the dictionary’s many features, including the variety of its definitions and mechanisms for user interaction. The article concludes with a discussion of ARTFL’s plans for the future developement of the DVLF

L'étude littéraire à l'ère du numérique: du texte à l'intertexte dans les "digital humanities"

An integral part of the growing international field of concerns and practices in and around the "Digital Humanities", computational and digitally-assisted approaches to humanities text collections have in the past several years become increasingly prevalent. This article aims to explore both the promise and perils of these new digital approaches to literary and historical data sets, as well as the methodological underpinnings that inform their elaboration. In particular, we will examine several computational approaches to literary-historical analysis in French literature undertaken by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, one of the oldest North American centres for digital humanities research

A Sheep in Wolff's Clothing: Émilie du Châtelet and the Encyclopédie

This article explores the use of Émilie Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique as both an acknowledged and unacknowledged source for the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and argues for Du Châtelet's inclusion as a full participant in the philosophical conversations the Encyclopédie enacts. Widely considered a minor voice who entered the Encyclopédie solely through the mediation of Samuel Formey—a largely forgotten and conflicted encyclopédiste—new evidence generated using techniques developed in the digital humanities suggests that Du Châtelet was a much more central figure in the Encyclopédie's engagement with the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff than previously thought

Something borrowed: sequence alignment and the identification of similar passages in large text collections

The following article describes a simple technique to identify lexically-similar passages in large collections of text using sequence alignment algorithms. Primarily used in the field of bioinformatics to identify similar segments of DNA in genome research, sequence alignment has also been employed in many other domains, from plagiarism detection to image processing. While we have applied this approach to a wide variety of diverse text collections, we will focus our discussion here on the identification of similar passages in the famous 18th-century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. Reference works, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, are generally expected to "reuse" or "borrow" passages from many sources and Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie was no exception. Drawn from an immense variety of source material, both French and non-French, many, if not most, of the borrowings that occur in the Encyclopédie are not sufficiently identified (according to our standards of modern citation), or are only partially acknowledged in passing. The systematic identification of recycled passages can thus offer us a clear indication of the sources the philosophes were exploiting as well as the extent to which the intertextual relations that accompanied its composition and subsequent reception can be explored. In the end,we hope this approach to "Encyclopedic intertextuality" using sequence alignment can broaden the discussion concerning the relationship of Enlightenment thought to previous intellectual traditions as well as its reuse in the centuries that followed

To quote or not to quote: Citation strategies in the encyclopedie

Ever since the first volume of the Encyclopedie was published in 1751, critics have complained about its liberal, and often unacknowledged, borrowings from other sources.1 The impression that this work, often hailed as the masterpiece of the Enlightenment, was merely cobbled together from bits and pieces of other books was reinforced by the composition method of the most prolific contributor, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who was known to employ a handful of secretaries, each of whom took dictation as the chevalier read from different texts

Rubidium-strontium analyses of ultramafic rocks and the origin of peridotites.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Geology and Geophysics. Thesis. 1965. Ph.D.Ph.D

Mining eighteenth century ontologies: Machine learning and knowledge classification in the encyclopédie

The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert was one of the most important and revolutionary intellectual products of the French Enlightenment. Mobilizing many of the great – and the notsogreat – philosophes of the 18th century, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, which sought to organize and transmit the totality of human knowledge while at the same time serving as a vehicle for critical thinking. In its digital form, it is a highly structured corpus; some 55,000 of its 77,000 articles were labeled with classes of knowledge by the editors making it a perfect sandbox for experiments with supervised learning algorithms. In this study, we train a Naive Bayesian classifier on the labeled articles and use this model to determine class membership for the remaining articles. This model is then used to make binary comparisons between labeled texts from different classes in an effort to extract the most important features in terms of class distinction. Reapplying the model onto the original classified articles leads us to question our previous assumptions about the consistency and coherency of the ontology developed by the Encyclopedists. Finally, by applying this model to another corpus from 18th century France, the Journal de Trévoux, or Mémoires pour l'Histoire des Sciences & des BeauxArts, new light is shed on the domain of Literature as it was understood and defined by 18th century writers