French and Francophone Digital Humanities Projects

The site includes a section on "Paris of Les misérables" with maps of sites and itineraries and a section on "characters" which includes a database of all characters and their encounters as well as character-graphs for the entire novel and for each of its five parts.

The contributors to "Age of Revolutions" are participating in the humanities, surveying revolutionary changes in history, encouraging the comparative study of revolutions, and exploring the hopes imbued in the term “revolution.”

Founded in 1982 as a result of a collaboration between the French government and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL Project is a consortium-based service that provides its members with access to North America's largest collection of digitized French resources.

In 1810, if you were strolling down one of the Grands Boulevards where all Paris gathered to socialize, what would you hear?
If you walked into one of the great theaters along the Boulevards, what would you hear from the stage?
The Digital Parisian Stage project aims to answer the second question with the hope that it will give us a hint about the answer to the first question. It leverages the work of scholars like Beaumont Wicks and archive projects like Gallica and Google Books to create a truly representative corpus of Parisian theater. The first phase, covering the Napoleonic period 1800-1815, has already yielded promising results.

Initiative from Duke University. It comprises a map of Francophone DH resources, a timeline, and links to courses using the digital materials made available through the projects being developed at Duke.

The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.

Open access repository of 38,000+ digitized pamphlets, plus related teaching and research tools.

The project invites you to follow the voyage of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo as it is depicted in his 13th century La Description du monde. The maps below plot the individual steps in Polo’s voyage, drawn from his travel account written in Franco-Italian as he roamed through the various kingdoms of the Middle East and Asia.

The Library of Glissant Studies is a database dedicated to making texts by and about the Martinican author Édouard Glissant (St. Marie, Martinique 1928 – Paris, France 2011) accessible and widely available.

This website offers an opportunity to explore the world of books on the eve of the French Revolution. It brings together material from the vast archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, a publisher and wholesaler who provided all kinds of books to all parts of France from 1769 to 1789.

This website is a "complete repertory of the characters in Balzac’s foundational series of realist novels, the places mentioned and visited, and the notable events within the novels."

The goal of this mapping project is to show how location played a role in shaping the collaborations between Decadent writers and their publishers at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris. The authors in question include Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, and Marcel Schwob.

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: Space, Time, Narrative.

What did the social, physical networks of the 18th century world of scholarship actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.

On the pages of this guide, you will find links to definitive and authoritative resources, both in print and online, on Proust's life, works, correspondence, and historical context, an exhaustive guide to the critical tradition of writing on Proust in English, an audiovisual companion to works of visual art and music mentioned in Proust's novel, and a selection of links to further digital resources.

The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to a wide public via new media. This podcast is dedicated to making the public discover new books in French studies.

A text creation initiative publishing open, plain text versions of works written over four centuries of Medieval French for scholarly, computational research.

It offers online access to pictorial works and texts selected from the collections of the Art Slide Library, the Rockefeller Library and the John Hay Library at Brown University.

This is a digital project that aims to create interactive 3D-digital models of great ‘lost’ monuments, architectural complexes, and diverse quartiers of medieval Paris.

Nous publions des tutoriels évalués par des pairs qui permettent l'initiation à et l'apprentissage d'un large éventail d'outils numériques, de techniques et de flux de travail pour faciliter la recherche et l'enseignement en sciences humaines et sociales. Nous tenons à créer une communauté diversifiée et inclusive de rédacteur(trice)s, d'auteur(e)s et de lecteur(trice)s.
N'hésitez pas à utiliser nos leçons pour acquérir de nouvelles compétences techniques ou pour comprendre l'utilisation de nouveaux outils, méthodes et procédures de recherche numériques en sciences humaines et sociales.

Project Vox concerns an important, relatively recent, scholarly development in philosophy: the acknowledgement that a number of early modern women have been unjustly ignored in our narratives of the history of philosophy. From Mary Astell, Lady Masham, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway in England to Émilie Du Châtelet in France, many women played significant roles in the development of modern philosophy, but their contributions have often gone unnoticed.

In May 1970, thousands of amateur photographers spread out across Paris to take pictures. They were participants in a photo contest, “This was Paris in 1970,” organized by the cooperative electronics store the Fnac. Each contestant had been assigned to document a 250m square of the city. By the end of the month, this army of photographers had produced an unprecedented collection of 100,000 photographs: 70,000 black-and-white prints and 30,000 colors slides. This website currently hosts 5,000 color slides from the 13th and 19th arrondissements, areas of the city which were undergoing significant change in 1960s and 1970s.
The project This was Paris in 1970 provides tools to explore the rich archive: a map to see the photos square by square; an object detector to search for photos of many objects from people to cats, cars to strollers; a similar photo viewer to identify photos by composition rather than subject; and articles providing context and analysis.

Visualizing Medieval Places is a digital project that explores place names found in literary and non-literary texts in medieval French.

The W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire Studies was founded in 1968 by the College of Arts and Sciences of Vanderbilt University as a joint project between the Department of French and Italian and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. Its core was the personal collection of the eminent Baudelaire scholar, William Thomas Bandy, who continued to work with the collection until his death in 1989. You can find several online exhibits on the website.

ThIs project highlights Albert Huet's diary which narrates his experience of WW1. The diary is accompanied by a transcription of the text as is, a standardized French version of the text, and an English transcription. In addition to the diary, there is also a digital map which is based on Albert's diary. Each location connects to a specific page in the diary and for each entry, there are short explanations in both French and English.

Tracks major cholera outbreaks in the Caribbean.

The website is designed to provide online access to both the French originals and the English translations of key primary sources dealing with the grain shortage faced by the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1789, which are found under the Translations menu. Alongside the French original, each translation is presented with a brief historical introduction to situate the reader in the time period and help understand how this particular pamphlet fits into the episode.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a highly interactive digital scholars lab for the collaborative research and study of pre-C20 Caribbean literature. The ECDA seeks to engage both scholars and students in a shared, critical study of the textual, material, and cultural histories of the Caribbean by providing them with innovative digital technologies and newly emerging discursive platforms for generating new knowledges of the Caribbean’s rich body of materials.

This website is a crossroads for literary fictions of the Haitian Revolution: texts composed as novels, short stories, novellas, short fictional sketches, poetry, and/or plays.

An Island Luminous is a site to help readers learn about Haiti’s history. Created by historian Adam M. Silvia and hosted online by Digital Library of the Caribbean, An Island Luminous combines rare books, manuscripts, and photos scanned by archives and libraries in Haiti and the United States with commentary by over one hundred (100) authors from universities around the world.

The Haitian Diaspora Oral History Digital Collection includes videos and outlines of oral history interviews conducted with individuals of Haitian ancestry that are well-renowned in the world of culture and the arts, education, community activism, civic leadership, and many professional organizations.

This site, produced by Duke’s Haiti Lab, is meant to serve as a guide and portal to online resources about Haiti, specifically historical materials relating to the country and writings by Haitian authors. It is geared towards providing maximum access to these resources to Haitian readers. It is a work in progress.

The division of early nineteenth-century Haiti into two separately governed states led to the creation of competing printing presses under Henry Christophe in the north and Alexandre Pétion in the south. Here, you can journey through the northern government of Haiti’s official newspapers and explore its yearly almanacs. Remnants of a robust culture of print, these rare documents, collected from archives across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, are presented together and in full text for the first time.

Le Progressiste: organe du Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, is an influential weekly newspaper published by the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM), which was founded by Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire. The newspaper provides a fuller understanding of the PPM’s development and gives scholars insight into Césaire’s ideas, views, and concerns, as well as those of his fellow PPM members

This project started as a visual record of colonial and early-national ruins in Haiti, but it’s grown in both scope and depth.
It serves as a visual preservation of Haïtian historical, natural, and cultural sites. Where possible, links are provided to external documentation (such as ISPAN).

Chris Jones and Stephanie Curci developed Mapping the Haitian Revolution for use with their high school classroom. The project is now available in other languages (French, Kreyol, and Spanish) thanks to the team at CreoleTrans. "Primarily, its purpose is to help our students understand the complicated narrative of the Haitian Revolution across time and space. These students include high school seniors as well as tenth-grade students, who study a shorter unit on the Haitian Revolution. We also wanted to provide a resource for other teachers at the high-school level who might be looking for a collection of English-language materials to help create or buttress an existing unit on the Haitian Revolution."

The Marronnage in Saint Domingue project digitizes over 12,000 fugitive slave notices from Affiches Américaines, the principal newspaper of Haiti of the Saint Domingue colony (now Haiti) from 1766-1790.

The RSHHGG Lab is an interactive online index of over 90 years of the Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie, the official publication of Haiti’s oldest intellectual society that is still active today. By indexing the contents of the journal, the site aims to increase the impact of this important publication by facilitating the work of scholars of Haiti in the US, Haiti, and beyond. It is our sincere hope that this effort will foster collaboration and new partnerships by connecting scholars of Haiti from all levels and locales.

The following site contains six excerpts from primary source texts about various aspects of the Haitian Revolution written by French writers. The excerpt subjects vary widely, each revealing a different perspective of one of the more under-recognized world events. All texts are preceded by an introduction that provides context and background information to aid readers in their discovery of these important texts and contribute to a better understanding of the Haitian Revolution itself.
Our primary goal in providing a place where these excerpts are made readily available and translated is to begin to cultivate and create accessible academic documents surrounding the Haitian Revolution.

This database seeks to make known the rich and varied culture of public theatre that existed in the colony from 1764 to 1791 and to promote further research in this area.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A searchable database of French and Francophone Studies digital projects