Abstract
In conjunction with the preparation of a critical edition in printed form of the complete works of D’Alembert, a group has been working for several years now to produce a digital edition of the correspondence of the famous French scholar and encyclopaedist based on the following principles: various means of consultation and search tools in the corpus, development of the many surviving manuscripts, renewal of the circulation within the corpus, the rich critical apparatus being formed and many other works by the author, and provision of useful and relevant research tools for the more specialized reader. This article describes the concrete results of the work and states the difficulties encountered, as well as the long-term prospects of development envisaged.
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Notes
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See the contribution by I. Passeron (2018).
- 3.
The edition of the formulae is ensured thanks to the Opensource Mathjax module (https://www.mathjax.org/), able to process LaTeX code fragments encapsulated within XHTML documents. In terms of reading, the results obtained with Mathjax are up to the performance of the renowned mathematical edition language.
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See the definition of lettre ostensible by I. Passeron in D’Alembert (2009, pp. 519–520).
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Sometimes partial, the square brackets can indicate the day and/or the month and/or the year.
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On the other hand, these difficulties remind us that the development of a digital edition implies the previous definition of an editorial policy, embodied here by a specific structure of information, which will be difficult to amend as soon as the data have already begun to be organized according to this structure, i.e., edited.
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Contrastingly, the data of the ENCCRE project (Edition Numérique Collaborative et CRitique de l’Encyclopédie—the Collaborative and Critical Digital Edition of the Encyclopédie), whose first version will be online in 2017, were primarily encoded in XML-TEI. See Guilbaud et al. (2014) and the website http://enccre.academie-sciences.fr
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Guilbaud, A. (2018). The Digital Edition of D’Alembert’s Correspondence. In: Borgato, M., Neuenschwander, E., Passeron, I. (eds) Mathematical Correspondences and Critical Editions. Trends in the History of Science. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73577-1_5
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