French Renaissance Typography (1470-1640) – TYPOREF

TYPOREF's main goal is to understand the evolution of typographic design in French Renaissance book, by developing digital tools. The project will investigate three complementary corpuses :
1. It will register, describe and study types and ornaments in French books. A specific online database will be developed. Using the IIIF open standard to access digital facsimiles of Renaissance books, it will localise types and ornaments into digital images. These images will be automaticaly processed thanks to specific software which will be developed during the project by computer scientists.
2. The team will investigate archive records to make a census of documents concerning typographic materials (printshop inventories, selling certificates, rental leases...) to provide information about people involved in their production and circulation. These documents will be register in the database.
3. Thanks to a partnership with museums, original tools (punches, matrices, woodcuts...) preserved in public collections will be studied and registered in the database.