The ARTFL Project

This project is a Digital Humanities collaboration between OBVIL (Observatoire de la Vie Littéraire/Observatory of Literary Life) at Sorbonne Université and the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, which investigated practices of borrowing, reuse, and appropriation of the Enlightenment in 19th-century French print culture. In the context of this project, we developed a tool, TextPAIR, for detecting similar passages and patterns of textual reuse applied to the Très Grande Bibliothèque, a corpus of over 130,000 texts digitized by the French National Library, in order to explore and better understand the legacy of the Enlightenment as an intellectual and textual phenomenon in the century that followed the French Revolution. Two separate databases were produced as a result of this project. For more background and preliminary results from this project, please consult our recent ARTFL Blog post.

This project would not have been possible without the support from the FMSH and the Mellon Foundation.

Encyclopédie - TGB (updated 12-2022)

This database contains a full-text comparison of the 28 volumes of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and the 130,000 texts from the Très Grande Bibliothèque (TGB).  Over 138,000 similar passages were found.

Explore these passages here

Frantext - TGB (updated 12-2022)

This database contains a full-text comparison of all pre-1800 texts from ARTFL-Frantext (1,367 texts) and the 130,000 texts from the Très Grande Bibliothèque (TGB).  Over 250,000 similar passages were found.

Explore these passages here