ARTFL Project

Link: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/

Project Status: Ongoing

The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) provides a collection of searchable databases of French language texts from the Middle Ages to the present.

The collection includes both public access and subscription databases of interest to medievalists. Also included are French-language dictionaries from the 17th-20th centuries. The texts may be searched by author, title, keyword, date, or genre, and proximity searching and frequency searches for individual words are also supported. Each text includes information on the edition from which it was taken, and allows the user to look up individual words in the text.

Public access databases include: Robert Estienne’s Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum (1552, a Latin-French dictionary); Epistemon (40 literary and poetic texts of the French Renaissance); The Multi-lingual Bible Project (Bibles in Latin, French, German, and English); and Perseus under PhiloLogic (Perseus Digital Library of Classical Texts with the University of Chicago’s PhiloLogic search engine). For a full list of public access databases, see: http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu.avoserv2.library.fordham.edu/content/public-databases

Subscription databases include: ARTFL-FRANTEXT (3,500 French-language texts from the 12th-20th centuries); Provençal Poetry (38 collections from the 12th-13th centuries); Textes de Français Ancien (TFA) (103 works from the 12th-15th centuries); Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th ed., 1740); Louis Moréri’s Le Grand dictionnaire historique (1759); and the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) database (1,960 vernacular texts from before 1375).

Click here for a full list of subscription databases.

ARTFL’s main corpus, ARTFL-FRANTEXT, consists of nearly 3,000 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. “Some” (a comparatively small number) of medieval and Renaissance texts are included.  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.  In addition to FRANTEXT, ARTFL has built hundreds of databases for researchers and students working in specialized disciplines and languages other than French.