"At present the corpus consists of nearly 2,000 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."
One of the largest of its kind in the world, the ARTFL database permits both the rapid exploration of single texts, and the inter-textual research of a kind. ARTFL is now on the Web, and the system is available through the Internet to its subscribers. Access to the database is organized through a consortium of user institutions, in most cases universities and colleges which pay an annual subscription fee.
The ARTFL Encyclopédie Project is currently developing an on-line version of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, including all 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates from the first edition, that is to say about 18,000 pages of text and exactly 20,736,912 words.
Published under the direction of Diderot between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie counted as contributors the most prominent philosophers of the time: Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, etc.
"These great minds (and some lesser ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas […] The impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous, not only in its original edition, but also in multiple reprintings in smaller formats and in later adaptations. It was hailed, and also persecuted, as the sum of modern knowledge, as the monument to the progress of reason in the eighteenth century. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and social developments of its time."
At present, while work continues on the fully navigational, full-text version, ARTFL is providing public access on its website to the Prototype Demonstration of Volume One. From Autumn 1998 a preliminary version is released for consultation by all ARTFL subscribers.
Mentioned on the ARTFL home page in the Reference Collection, other ARTFL projects are: the 1st (1694) and 5th (1798) editions of the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française; Jean Nicot's Trésor de la langue française (1606) Dictionary; Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1740 edition) (text of an image-only version); The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus; Roget's Thesaurus, 1911 edition; Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary; the French Bible by Louis Segond and parallel Bibles in German, Latin, and English, etc.
Created by Michael S. Hart in 1971, the Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the Internet. It is now the oldest digital library on the Web, and the biggest considering the number of works (1,500) which has been digitalized for it, with 45 new titles per month. Michael Hart's purpose is to put on the Web as many literary texts as possible for free.
In his e-mail of August 23, 1998, Michael S. Hart explained:
"We consider e-text to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to e-texts, especially in schools. […] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 e-texts on the Net, and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average e-text from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%… thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 e-texts to 1,000 time as many… a trillion and a quadrillion in US terminology."