9. Selected Electronic Texts and Online Dictionaries
Electronic Texts
For other public domain (free access sites), see Part 11 of this guide. Presented here are the Harvard-licensed site, ARTFL, and Gallica, prominent resources for searchable full-text and online dictionaries, including historical language dictionaries.
ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
Background Note
A collaboration between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL database presents full texts of nearly 2,000 works representing a broad range of written French--in literature, philosophy, arts, economics and sciences. Novels, verse, theatre, journalism, essays, correspondence and treatises are included covering the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. The database is intended for literary and linguistic analysis, with advanced concordance capabilities. The Philologic search system allows for powerful searching and reporting capabilities.
In addition, ARTFL has separate databases of Provençal poetry and French women writers and the B.A.S.I.L.E. database of prose works in full text. ARTFL hosts electronic versions of Diderot's and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie, Scudéry's Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus and Balzac's La Comédie humaine. and ARTFL also serves as a portal for the University of Chicago's other collaborative electronic projects with publishers such as the Editions Honoré Champion, the CNRS, the Center for Research Libraries, the ItalNet Consortium and others.
Searching for texts and words in texts
From the main page, the following links will be of particular interest:
- Select the Main ARTFL Database: FRANTEXT to search keywords in texts or to browse the bibliography of authors/texts included. Click on SEARCH and enter terms such as Author, Title, Genre (e.g. theatre), date (e.g. a range, 1850-1900, for example) or any combination of these terms. You may also search for words in the texts by adding terms in the "search text(s) for:______."
- More searchable texts are located in the New Additions section of the site. The search protocols described above are available for this collection of texts, as well.
- The ARTFL Collaborations link will lead to the B.A.S.I.L.E. database, a collection of prose/narrative works from all periods, readable and searchable in full-text.
- ARTFL's Reference Works link will lead to the dictionaries mentioned below.
- Extensive help and other instructions are located in the "PhiloLogic" or "User Manual" links from each of the above collections and from other pages beyond the main page. Essential information for searching is in 3.1 Accents and Special Characters.
(**Note: You will want to search all three collections, FRANTEXT, New Additions and B.A.S.I.L.E. for authors/texts. For Baudelaire, for example, FRANTEXT contains Petits Poèmes en Prose (1962 Garnier editions) and New Additions contains Les Fleurs du Mal (1942 edition) and Petits Poèmes en Prose (1954 Gallimard edition).
ARTFL's Dictionary Collection
ARTFL's dictionary collection includes searchable electronic versions of a dozen dictionaries, including:
- The newly added Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (TLFi), a contemporary French dictionary that permits simultaneous searching of a word in several other databases, such as the 8th and 9th eds. of the Dictionnaire de l'Academie Française, FRANTEXT, and la base des datations (a selection of dictionary sources of various periods).
- Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, first edition (1694), 4th edition (1762), 5th edition (1798), 6th edition (1835) and 8th edition (1932-35)
- Laboratoire de Français Ancien (texts from the 11th-12th centuries and textes de moyen français, 14th-15th centuries)
- Estienne's Dictionarium Latinogallicum
- Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoyse (1606)
- Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique
- Jean-François Féraud's Dictionnaire critique de la langue français (1787)
** Click on the link for Reference Works to select dictionary search forms and to link to background information on each dictionary. You may search by word(s) as dictionary entries (called "headwords") or for words in the full-text of entries. (Search instructions/help are located at the bottom of the individual dictionary search screens).
Gallica
Background Note
Begun in 1997 as the major digitization project at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica includes full-text of over 100,000 volumes and 300,000 images covering the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century material. Residing in Gallica are dictionaries and encyclopedias, journals, manuscripts, recordings and images. Various collections compose "Les Dossiers de Gallica," such as Gallica Classique (Garnier editions), le dossier Proust, Voyages en France, Voyages en Afrique, La Bibliothèque de Voltaire à la Bibliothèque nationale de Russie, Le Rêve d'Emile Zola dans tous ses états, le dossier Utopie, Le dossier "Sociétés Savantes (d'Aquitaine et de Lorraine), and an audio collection, La Voix sur Gallica (poetry and politics).
From the main page, click on "Recherche" to search for literary texts (by title words, author, subject) or to search for words in texts via "recherche libre."
Dictionaries in Gallica
Gallica's dictionary collection consists of over 200 works related to law, sciences, economics, philosophy, theology, biography, history and geography, in addition to language dictionaries and encyclopedias. From the main search page, click on Recherche, then on Dictionnaires link at the right of the page. The full-text of the dictionaries (some incomplete) is available, but it is not possible to search the texts by word(s).
The Dictionnaires de la Langue française link provides access to many editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, other important historical language dictionaries and specialized dictionaries (etymologies, synonyms, and the like).
CD-ROMs in Widener
The following CD-ROMs are available in the Widener Reference area:
Le corpus Montaigne [computer file] / édité par Claude Blum. [Paris]: Chadwyck Healey France, Bibliopolis: co-édition, Editions Honoré Champion; Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey Inc., 1997.
Widener: CD-ROM RR 174 RBS To arrange to use this database, inquire at the Widener Reference Desk
Contains Théologie naturelle de Raymond Sebond, Journal de voyage, Ephémérides, Oeuvres de la Boétie, essays, marginalia, and correspondence.
Voltaire électronique [computer file] / [general editor, Ulla Kölving]. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998.
Widener: CD-ROM RR 148 RBS
Based upon the Voltaire Foundation Oxford edition of the Complete works of Voltaire (edited by T. Besterman et al..), this database includes all of Voltaire's literary works, searchable by keyword, title, literary form, and date of edition. Texts which have not yet been published in the Complete works are drawn either from the original sources or from the nineteenth-century Moland edition of Voltaire's works.