Corpus Descartes. Projet d’édition en ligne des œuvres et de la correspondance de Descartes – PRODESCARTES

The Descartes Corpus is a research project which aims at an on-line edition of the works and correspondence of Descartes. It is led by the team "Identité et subjectivité" from the University of Caen (Basse-Normandie), in scientific collaboration with the "Centro di studi su Descartes e il Seicento" from the University del Salento (Lecce), the 'Centre d'études cartésiennes" (from Paris IV) and in technical collaboration with the GREYC, the research laboratory in computer science from University from Caen and Noopsis Society. This project has four principal objectives : ' to publish on-line and in text mode the original editions (Clerselier Institut for the correspondence, with the transcription of the original footnotes and bookmarks) as well as the scanned pictures of the pages from the original edition and the Adam-Tannery edition ; ' to develop a critical apparatus and some corpus exploration tools such as a lemmatized and multi-linguistic search engine, that would take advantage of the digital edition. It would make it possible for scientific editors to modify their own footnotes instantly via a Web interface or, for readers, to generate indexes of dynamic occurrences (pointing to the parts of the text in which those occurrences are to be found) or dynamic typed cases (lexical fields). For example, one could search all the letters of the correspondence for the idea of "body" included those in which the body is referred to by a stylistic device or a personal pronoun, or one could choose, by browsing the Principes (1647) and clicking a button, to visualize, copy and paste or print additions (by Picot or Descartes himself) from one edition to another ; ' to propose translations of the works and letters ; ' At last but not least, to offer the readers a reservoir of studies or technical notes about Descartes's publications in the form of articles, reports or more important works. These studies would be on the sidelines of the cartesian corpus and available from the website home page, after the scientific editors' approval.