ARTFL Encyclopédie - Robert Morrissey, General Editor; Glenn Roe, Assoc. Editor

Three major types of metadata corrections at the article level:
1. Article Classifications (class of knowledge, Nom de science)
2. Article Authors
3. Article Headwords (main and sub articles)

Classes of Knowedge

Thanks to work by a team of students led by Dena Goodman at the University of Michigan we have both "normalized" (orthographically) and english translations of the original classes of knowledge.

Examples:
Original class - Geog. ; Geogr. ; terme de Geographie
Normalized class - Géographie
English class - Geography


For questions about "Normalized" classes and the translations. (e.g., "terme d'Ecole; Terme d'école; School term"), please Contact Us.

Problems with Authorship

Correction Statement - 1st Edition (1998): 
Please note that we have not yet attempted to integrate the results of numerous studies of the authors of articles found in the Encyclopédie or authorial attributions not found in the Encyclopédie itself. The most important of these studies include:

Richard N. Schwab, Walter E. Rex and John Lough, Inventory of Diderot's Encyclopédie in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (volumes 80, 83, 85, 91, 92, 93, 223; 1971-1984); 
Frank Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals in SVEC, vol. 257, 1988, and 
1. "Liste des articles de l'Encyclopédie portant l'astérisque" (pp. 133 - 206) 2. "Liste des articles non signés qu'on peut attribuer avec certitude à Diderot et qui sont reproduits dans cette édition" (pp. 207 - 210) 3. "Liste des articles non signés qu'on pourrait peut-être attribuer à Diderot, mais qui ne sont pas reproduits dans cette édition" (pp. 211-219) in John Lough and Jacques Proust, Oeuvres Complètes de Diderot, Edition critique et annotée, volume 5 (Paris, Hermann, 1976).

We strongly recommend that our users consult these works to verify results concerning attribution and authorship obtained from our site.

 

Using the Schwab Inventory

Richard N. Schwab, Walter E. Rex and John Lough, Inventory of Diderot's Encyclopédie (1971-1984)

• Meetings in Chicago and Paris with Pierre Caye, Martine Groult, Serge Trottein (CNRS - Centre Jean Pépin) - Fall 2007
• Built a corrections database for searching Schwab in order to incorporate remote corrections
• First experiment: 1,600 unsigned articles attributed by Schwab:
  Contributors who were attributed authorship to articles in the Schwab are indicated by the number 5 : e.g., Voltaire5, Saint-Lambert5, etc.

Diderot's Articles
Following Proust & Lough (Hermann Edition, see above) we consolidated all of the old Diderot attributions (Diderot1, Diderot2, Diderot5, etc.) into 3 categories:
1. Article signed by Diderot (*) -- Diderot
2. Unsigned articles which can be given clear, sure attributions and thus published in Proust’s edition -- Diderot2 
3. Unsigned articles where possible attributions have varying degrees of certitude, and which Proust does not include in his edition -- Diderot3

Articles by d'Alembert
Using the list of d'Alembert articles at the end of Martine Groult's book: D'Alembert et la mécanique de la vérité dans l'Encyclopédie, we verified the list of articles that were signed with d'Alembert's mark (O) and appear as authored by d'Alembert in the database. Additionally, we added more than 50 articles that were unsigned but which can be attributed to d'Alembert with a high degree of certainty, these have d'Alembert2 as their author.
Some articles, however, have been misrecognized (i.e. are not treated as articles, or are several subarticles, etc.) and therefore still need correcting.
Example: Article PELÉ (actually 2 articles - PÉLÉCOÏDE missed)

Other Contributors to the Encyclopédie
Using the Schwab Inventory as well as Frank Kafker's The Encyclopedists as individuals we have corrected and normalized our author list. We have also added all of the known authors who signed or to whom articles were attributed.

Currently there are 134 identified authors in our database.

Headword Corrections
Many Headwords have been corrected and/or expanded - Example: the "Bois" articles, etc.
In several cases objects in articles were recognized as sub-articles, e.g., the article "BAS", where "DU FUST" was recognized as another headword.
These have been provisionally changed to "XXX (suite)" as in "BAS (suite)" until we can make a more permanent structural change.

Metadata Corrections - Some numbers

Old Version (12/07)	New Version (11/08)
Diderot: 5,717 articles	Diderot: 6,328 articles (+611)
D'Alembert: 1,438 articles	D'Alembert: 1,634 articles (+196)
D'Holbach: 432 articles	D'Holbach: 1,049 articles (+617)
Saint-Lambert: 0 articles	Saint-Lambert: 17 articles (+17)
No Author (XXX): 37,707 articles	No Author: 35,612 (-2,095)
Unclassified articles: 22,450	Unclassified articles: 15,833 (-6,617)
Total Metadata Changes: 10,586