In 1957 the French government initiated the creation of a new dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue Française. 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 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 its long history:
* 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.
At present, 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 as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. 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. The FRANTEXT corpus is updated as new high-quality digital texts become available.
In addition to FRANTEXT, ARTFL has built hundreds of databases for researchers and students working in specialized disciplines and languages other than French. Please see our Databases, Resources, and Collaborations pages for links to these projects.
New Opportunities for Research
ARTFL's stable of databases 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 databases permit both rapid exploration of single texts and inter-textual research of a kind virtually impossible without the aid of a computer. For a description of the latest research developments underway at ARTFL, please visit our Research Blog.
PhiloLogic is a tool for ARTFL text research which provides a menu driven system featuring a sophisticated help program that can be accessed at any time. PhiloLogic does not require any specialized knowledge of computers -- in fact, this system provides an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with the possibilities of computer-assisted research and teaching. The ARTFL Project has written full documentation for PhiloLogic, available here.
PhiloLogic provides several ways for users to select the texts they wish to analyze. Users may search a single text, texts by a single author, texts from a particular time period, texts with a particular word in the title, or all the texts in the database. For example, one might wish to work with all the texts of Balzac in the database, or all the texts published between 1750 and 1789. A single command will select these texts for further analysis.
ARTFL's PhiloLogic system supports a number of searching options. A user may search for a single word, a word root, prefix, suffix or a list of words created by the user. For example, one might search for the word liberté in the texts published between 1789 and 1794, or all of the words associated with "artist" -- artiste, artistes, écrivain, écrivains, poète, poètes, etc -- in the works of Zola. In many cases a researcher will not merely be interested in the occurrences of single words or lists of words, but where words occur in texts. Philologic allows the user to search for logical combinations of words and word lists. One might, for example, search for all the occurrences of words associated with "artist" where words beginning with "fem" -- femme, femmes, feministe, etc. -- are found in the same sentence in the works of Zola.
Several display formats are available to the Philologic user. Results can be displayed on screen line by line, with the search word highlighted or centered. The user may also browse through the full context of any result, examining many sentences or paragraphs around the target of the search. Philologic displays the bibliographic information and page number for each occurrence and can sort the results on screen by date, author name, keywords and other fields.
Access To The ARTFL Database
Access to the databases is organized through a consortium of user institutions, in most cases universities and colleges, each of which pay an annual subscription fee. In 2009, this fee is $500 (US) for PhD granting institutions and $250 (US) for other universities and colleges. All scholars and students at affiliated institutions have access to the database. Our Subscription Information page contains more on database access.
Both the CNRS and the University of Chicago are committed to the future growth of the ARTFL Project. These activities include expansion of the size of the database, correction of texts already in the database, and continued development of access and analysis software. The Project has obtained many important texts from other scholars and welcomes new contributions and proposals for collecting more texts. ARTFL expects to continue improving its research systems and plans to develop new analytical tools as well. We welcome joint projects with other institutions and invite you to contact us to discuss possible collaborations. Users at member universities will continue to play an important role in providing direction to the future development of the ARTFL Project. Please consult the ARTFL news page for updates concerning newly available texts and tools.
The ARTFL Project is supported by a full-time staff at the University of Chicago. We encourage you to contact us with any questions you may have about the project, such as the availability of texts, operation of the system, or the costs of using the database.
The ARTFL Project Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Division of the Humanities University of Chicago 1115 East 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637 tel: 773-702-8488 | email: artfl[at]artfl[dot]uchicago[dot]edu