"In July of 1776, after eight years of financial and managerial haggling, the first volumes of the Robinet Supplément to the Encyclopédie finally went on the market. The editor had spent six years buying and borrowing articles from more than a hundred compilers, scientists, and scholars in many countries and of widely varying reputations and ability. The result is an abbreviated Enlightenment encyclopaedia: faulty, useful, summary, and provocative."*
Search the Supplément
The ARTFL Project's Supplément à l'Encyclopédie database contains 4.91 million words, 125,377 unique forms, 3,863 pages of text, and 4 volumes of articles divided into 7,279 Main Headwords and 1,632 Sub-Headwords. Using automatic identification procedures based on typographic patterns, we have extracted 95% reasonable author attributions, 1,900 identified links to the Encyclopédie, 6,789 identified classes of knowledge, 1,600 identified parts of speech and 142 notes.
The Supplément project is still under development. We are aware that many typographical errors have been introduced into the text when we captured the data. Unfortunately, due to the size of the Supplément and its great semantic diversity, the correction process we have begun will continue for some time.
*Kathleen Hardesty, The Supplément to the Encyclopédie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).