Monday, March 14, 2005

New Product Announcement--->The ARTFL Project

ARTFL Project

Researchers may already have used this as for some reason ARTFL had provided our ip with access, even though we didn't have a subscription, possibly a holdover from an earlier trial. However, now we have a sub so we're all legal.

A full-text retrieval database of classical French writings. Consists of nearly 2000 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing.

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 the past eight years:

* 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.

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