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ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)


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Description: The ARTFL Project In 1957 the French government initiated the creation of a new dictionary of the French language, the Tresor de la Langue Francaise. In order to provide access to a large body of word samples, it was decided to transcribe an extensive selection of French texts for use with a computer. Twenty years later, a corpus totaling some 150 million words had been created, reresenting a broad range of written French -- from novels and poetry to biology and mathematics -- stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It soon became apparent that this corpus of French texts was an important resource not only for lexicographers, but also for many other types of humanists and social scientists engaged in French studies - on both sides of the Atlantic. The result of this realization was American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) -- a cooperative project established in 1981 by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago. The ARTFL project has focused on three objectives over the past eight years: to include a variety of texts so as to make the database as versatile as possible; to create a system that would be easily accessible to the research community; to provide researchers with an easy-to-use but effective tool.

The Database: At present the corpus consists of nearly 2000 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. We have also recently added a Provençal database that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions. New Opportunities for Research: The ARTFL database is one of the largest of its kind in the world. The number, variety and historical range of its texts allow researchers to go well beyond the usual narrow focus on single works or single authors. The database permits both the rapid exploration of single texts, and the inter-textual research of a kind virtually impossible without the aid of a computer. (Source: vendor website.)

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