ed in 1981 by the Institut
national de la langue francaise (INaLF) (National Institute of the French
Language, based in France) and the Division of the Humanities of the University
of Chicago. Its purpose is to be a research tool for scholars and students in
all areas of French studies.

The origin of the project is a 1957 initiative of the French government to
create a new dictionary of the French language, the Tresor de la Langue
Francaise (Treasure of the French Language). 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 17th to the 20th centuries.

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 the ARTFL Project, as explained on its website:

"At present the corpus consists of nearly 2,000 texts, ranging from classic
works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical
writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally
represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as
some medieval and Renaissance texts. We have also recently added a Provencal
database that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. Genres include
novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises.
Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and
philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting
the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to
these editions."

One of the largest of its kind in the world, the ARTFL database permits both the
rapid exploration of single texts, and the inter-textual research of a kind.
ARTFL is now on the Web, and the system is available through the Internet to its
subscribers. Access to the database is organized through a consortium of user
institutions, in most cases universities and colleges which pay an annual
subscription fee.

The ARTFL Encyclopedie Project is currently developing an on-line version of
Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedi