The seeds of cooperation across the Internet have certainly already been sown. Our NetGlos Project has depended on the goodwill of volunteer translators from Canada, U.S., Austria, Norway, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and other countries. I think the hundreds of visitors we get coming to the NetGlos pages everyday is an excellent testimony to the success of these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on cooperative relationships — although not necessarily on a volunteer basis."
3.4. Textual Databases
Let us take the example of two textual databases relating to the French language — the French FRANTEXT and the US-French ARTFL Project.
The FRANTEXT textual database has been available on the Web through subscription since the beginning of 1995. It is prepared in France by the Institut national de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language), a section of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (National Center for Scientific Research). This interactive database includes 180 million words resulting from the automatic processing of a collection of 3,500 texts in arts, techniques and sciences, representing five centuries of literature (16th-20th centuries).
At the beginning of 1998, 82 research centers and university libraries in Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan were subscribing to FRANTEXT, with 1,250 work stations connected to the database, and about 50 questioning sessions per day. The detailed results of the inquiry sent to FRANTEXT users in January 1998 are presented on the website by Arlette Attali.
In the future, Arlette Attali is thinking about "contributing to the development of the linguistic tools associated to the FRANTEXT database and getting teachers, researchers and students to know them." In her e-mail of June 11, 1998, she also explained the changes brought by the Internet in her professional life:
"As I was more specially assigned to the development of textual databases at the INaLF, I had to explore the websites giving access to electronic texts and test them. I became a 'textual tourist' with the good and bad sides of this activity. The tendency to go quickly from one link to another, and to skip through the information, was a permanent danger — it is necessary to target what you are looking for if you don't want to lose your time. The use of the Web totally changed my working methods — my investigations are not only bookish and within a narrow circle anymore, on the contrary they are expanding thanks to the electronic texts available on the Internet."
The ARTFL Project (ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) is a cooperative project established in 1981 by the Institut national de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language, based in France) and the Division of the Humanities of the University of Chicago. Its purpose is to be a research tool for scholars and students in all areas of French studies.
The origin of the project is a 1957 initiative of the French government to create a new dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue Française (Treasure of the French Language). 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, representing a broad range of written French — from novels and poetry to biology and mathematics — stretching from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
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 the ARTFL Project, as explained on its website: