Search

This case study presents the Dictionnaire numérique de la Ferme générale (1664-1794), a digital dictionary of the General Farm created in the course of FermeGé, which is a project accredited by the Agence nationale de la recherche in 2021, from its conceptual modelling to its Web deployment. While the dictionary initially appeared to the group of historians writing the entries to be a simple object with an organic structure, the need to make the data available in a Web environment proved to be an essential step in structuring the information. This initial point in the dialogue between historians and engineers led us to encode the structure of the records and the named entities in TEI XML to add a semantic layer to the raw text. In the same perspective, processing the bibliography and sources systematically mentioned at the end of a record enabled these elements to be indexed for later processing. This phase gradually changed the project’s approach to the dictionary. From then on, the dictionary was no longer simply an organic work, but was gradually transformed into a hybrid object backed by a relational database. The aim of this article is to analyse the contribution of digital humanities and documentary engineering to the project.

This textometric analysis, performed with the TXM software, offers a re-reading of a Franco-Ontarian play where each character is characterized by the language register he uses. The analysis of the lexicon of Michel Ouellette’s play French Town (1994) highlights the peculiarities of the language of Cindy, both in the way she tries to express herself, in her vocabulary and in her way of expressing her emotions. Thus, the “calcul des spécificités” method reveals that the three lexical units with the greatest frequency relate to the character of Cindy and their analysis shows how she manages to express her emotions although she has great difficulties to say I.

A corpus collecting rewritings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice allows us to study intertextuality and to represent it through a network of correspondences and within a comparative digital edition. For this purpose, we examine the output of two text reuse detection tools, TextPAIR and Tracer, in order to combine their treatments and exploit each one’s best potential. We propose a series of treatments to enrich the results and to overcome specific challenges observed. These technical manipulations allow us to interpret the results obtained for an essay by Pierre-Simon Ballanche and confront them with empirical analyses of the Orphic topos. Thus, we show that analysis supported by computational techniques is all the more useful for the study of intertextuality as it is adapted to the corpus.

Medieval sermons brim with tens of thousands of exempla, the “exemplary short stories” frequently used to convey belief and morals to the faithful. Long considered a class of dogmatic, religious, and moral texts, they were mostly studied as a subgroup of folktales and fables in literary studies. With the “anthropological turn” in historical research, new attention was paid to exempla as sources of cultural and historical insight, notably by the historian Jacques Le Goff and his student-inheritors. ThEMA, a database of medieval exempla, began life in the 1990s in the hands of these inheritors, and has grown and transformed since then. It currently holds over 12,000 indexed exempla from the long “global Middle Ages”, stretching from Latin Europe to Byzantium to Asia, and drawing from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist sources. All exempla are carefully encoded and assigned metadata, and linked to keywords and thesauri, to enable researchers to undertake a variety of inquiries into these cultural artifacts. The most recent transformation of ThEMA into XML-TEI format, within a searchable database that provides powerful interfaces, has permitted the project to fully engage with FAIR data standards to ensure longevity and broader usability of the data for researchers and the general public.

The benefits of digital editions do not need to be demonstrated: surely, the edition text can be enriched with comments, multiple translations, grammatical annotations, metrics, and so forth. Furthermore, the encoding of the text and the associated apparatus in XML-TEI turns the edition into a database that can be consulted by the reader according to various needs. The TEI provides accurate standardised elements for the description of handwritten sources. However, TEI-encoded apparatuses are not so much meant to be interpreted by humans as processed by machines. In this respect, the Ekdosis LuaLaTeX package developed by Robert Alessi is a precious tool for philologists undertaking to make a critical edition of an ancient text, for it allows them to type in LaTeX every item of the edition (variants, sources, translation, commentary) while requesting at the same time PDF and XML-TEI ouput files, the former to be read and the latter to be searched. As a result, Ekdosis appears as a tool that combines two needs: that of producing a printed edition in compliance with philological traditions and that of providing what Donald J. Mastronarde and Richard J. Tarrant have called “actionable texts for use in digital research”. The purpose of this article is to expose, based on a commented example taken from my edition of the atellanae, the method I followed to write with Ekdosis the constituent elements of a digital critical edition.

Since 2014, the German Center for Art History Paris has had a department for Digital Humanities, which conducts its own research and supports projects at the DFK Paris by designing and implementing digital research. The projects have produced extensive data sets and have modeled space and spatial phenomena in different ways. Their results offer numerous opportunities for further research.

The present paper describes a project aiming at editing University glosses of the thirteenth century copied around the Aristotelian treatises on nature. No reference edition of this corpus has been carried out. Furthermore, editions of glosses in paper or electronic form do not always meet the reader’s needs, among which the rendition of complex manuscript traditions and of the link between the glosses and the text, or a simplified interface for reading the text and the marginal and interlinear glosses sequentially. XML-TEI encoding allows to render these features and to produce outputs to paper and electronic formats, thanks to XSLT transformation sheets. The electronic format enables the editions of ancient sources to be read in new ways. Through the creation of encoding and transforming tools and methodologies, the project seeks the constitution of a resource center for scientific edition.