ARLETTE ATTALI (Paris)
#Head of Research and Internet Projects at the INaLF (Institut national de la langue française - National Institute of the French Language)
The purpose of the INaLF — part of the France's National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) — is to design research programmes on the French language, particularly its vocabulary. The INaLF's constantly expanding and revised data, processed by special computer systems, deal with all aspects of the French language: literary discourse (14th-20th centuries), everyday language (written and spoken), scientific and technical language (terminologies), and regional languages. This data, which is an very important study resource, is made available to people interested in the French language (teachers and researchers, business people, the service sector and the general public) through publications and databases.
Frantext is one of the best French textual databases on the Internet. It is a collection of about 3,000 digitized French texts from the 16th to the 20th centuries, with a search facility (Stella) for literary, linguistic, lexicographical, and stylistic research. The database, which was revamped in 1998, now has a more user-friendly interface, more efficient online help and better computing tools. A second version is an experimental section of 400 grammaticaly-encoded novels of 19th and 20th centuries.
*Interview of June 11, 1998 (original interview in French)
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
At the INaLF, I was mostly building textual databases, so I had to explore websites that gave access to electronic texts and test them. I became a "textual tourist", which has good and bad sides. The tendency to go quickly from one link to another and skip through the information was a permanent danger — you have to focus on what you're looking for so as not to waste time. Using the Web has totally changed the way I work. My research is no longer just book-based and thus limited, but is expanding thanks to the electronic texts available on the Internet.
= What are your new projects?
I'd like to help develop linguistic tools linked with Frantext and make them available to teachers, researchers and students.
*Interview of January 17, 2000 (original interview in French)