Overview of the ARTFL Encyclopédie
Project personnel, advisory board and foundation support | Current state of the EncyclopédieHistorical description | Physical description | Edition used for the ARTFL Encyclopédie
Current State of the ARTFL Encyclopédie
The data input for the entire Encyclopédie, 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates legends, has been completed. It implements a fast, flexible search engine and a variety of functions:
- Searches for articles or groups of articles by:
- Article headword
- Author
- Category of knowledge (or Classification)
- Normalized Category of knowledge (e.g., Litter. = Littérature)
- English Category of knowledge (e.g., Littérature = Literature)
- Part of speech
These searches can be run in various combinations. Ex: Author = alembert and Classification = astron
- Full text searches for words or phrases
The user can search the entire Encyclopédie, or search within a limited corpus as defined using the article search criteria. Ex: author = alembert, search articles for ge/ome/trique
- Cross-references from one article to another.
- Links from plate legends to plate images.
- Links to facsimile images of each page of the text
The ARTFL Encyclopédie in Numbers
17 volumes of articles andBack to top
11 volumes of plate legends, roughly
18,000 pages of text76,242 Items Identified, including
44632 main articles,
28366 subarticles, and
2575 plate legends20,736,912 Total Words
391,893 Unique Word Forms
Historical Description of the Encyclopédie
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The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société
de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Diderot,
with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751
and 1772. Contributors included the most prominent philosophes:
Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Marmontel, d’Holbach
and Turgot, to name only a few. These great minds (and some lesser
ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating
in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge
and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than
140 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive
reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine
de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas.
- Publication dates of individual volumes
- Chronologie détaillée de l'Encyclopédie
Due to problems of censorship, successive volumes of the Encyclopéd ie appeared at an irregular pace. The first seven volumes were issued, one per year, from 1751 to 1757. Distribution of the ten remaining volumes took place in 1765. The volumes of plates, relatively unaffected by censorship, were released at the rate of roughly one per year from 1762-1772. In its original printing, about 4,000 copies were made.
The impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous, not only in its original edition, but also in multiple reprintings in smaller formats and in later adaptations. It was hailed, and also persecuted, as the sum of modern knowledge, as the a monument to the progress of reason in the eighteenth century. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and social developments of its time.
Physical Description of the Encyclopédie
- The Text.
Each of the 17 volumes of text contains an average of 950 two-column folio pages. The entire series comprises approximately 72,000 articles, 16,500 pages, containing some 17,000,000 words. The typical article includes the head word, its part of speech and gender, the category of knowledge to which the article belongs (e.g. architecture, histoire, etc.), and the discursive, definitional text. There are multiple entries for many words that reflect the use of the term in different domains. For instance, the word "Ame" is first discussed as a theological term, and then as part of the expressions "Ame des bêtes", "Ame des plantes" and "Ame de Saturne", and as it is used in the domains of "Lutherie", "Architecture et Dessein", "Stuccateur", "Artillerie", "Boisselier", and "Ame ou essieu d'un rôle de tabac". There is no "typical" length for an article. Some are as short as one sentence; some, like "Anatomie", about 28 full pages, are almost small books in themselves.
There are also a number of preliminary texts, including the "Discours préliminaire" of the first volume, various "Avertissements" in subsequent volumes, and several "Eloges" dedicated to deceased collaborators in the enterprise. Together with such "showpiece" articles as "Dictionnaire" by d'Alembert and "Encyclopédie" by Diderot, these texts furnish insights into the actual writing and making of the Encyclopédie.
- The Plates.
The Encyclopédie contains 2, 569 plates, grouped by theme, in 11 volumes. The original folio edition includes a mix of single-page, and double-, triple-, and quadruple-page images. Legends precede each group of plates. Individual plates frequently contain multiple figures, usually in combination with references numbers or characters that coordinate with the text of the legends.
Though the Encyclopédie was, from its inception, conceived as an illustrated reference work, the first volume of the Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux et les arts mécaniques avec leur explication appeared only in 1762, eleven years after the publication of the first volume of text. In addition, the original estimate of 600 plates soon proved to be insufficient. These factors made coordination of the text and the plates difficult. In some cases, the authors were able to consult the completed images while writing their articles and to give precise references to the pertinent plate and figure numbers. In other cases, the plates were drawn long after the completion of the articles, and sometimes there is very little correlation between the two.
Edition Used for the ARTFL Encyclopédie
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We have used the first printing of the Paris edition as the text
for the prototype, and we will continue to use this edition for
the entirety of the project. Richard Schwab kindly agreed to
expertise the microfiche version produced by IDC (Leiden, The
Netherlands) and confirmed that it reproduces a good copy of the
first edition, as defined in his Inventory of Diderot's Encyclopédie,
volume I (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,
vol. 80 (1971), pp. 64-78).
For technical reasons, we are temporarily using page and plate images from the reprint produced by Pergamon Press, 1969, and not from the IDC microfiche copy using the for actual keyboarding of the ARTFL Encyclopédie. We have compared the text and page images and found no differences, but we cannot guarantee that the images correspond exactly to the edition used for the data capture, although, to the best of our knowledge, we believe that to be the case as suggested in our general comparison. We would be very interested in any reports of copy discrepencies between the text data and page images.