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Introducing Tout d’Holbach

Have you ever used Tout Voltaire or the ARTFL Encyclopédie and thought: ”Wow! This is so helpful!”? Have you ever planned on giving a Zoom talk on pandemics in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and realised that all you had to do to get your primary sources was to search the database for ‘peste’, ‘pestilent.*’, ‘épidémi.*’, nothing more? Or maybe you wanted to write an article on Voltaire and dodos? You looked up ‘dodo’ in Tout Voltaire, and it only took you about three seconds to realise that you had pushed your quest for originality a bit too far. Have you ever wished that something like Tout Voltaire existed also for other authors? Well, if you work on d’Holbach, we’ve got good news for you!

The ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago and the Voltaire Foundation are very pleased to announce the release of Tout d’Holbach, a database that brings together fully searchable transcriptions of the vast majority of d’Holbach’s works. (If at this point you cannot be bothered to read more and wish to start experimenting with the database right away, here is the link: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/tout-d-holbach.)

At the moment, Tout d’Holbach only includes d’Holbach’s original writings, defined as those considered to be ‘œuvres originales publiées isolément’ (‘original works published separately’) in Jeroom Vercruysse’s fundamental Bibliographie descriptive des imprimés du baron d’Holbach (1971; new ed. 2017) (The Essai sur les préjugés and the Tableau des saints are not there yet, but they will be soon! We promise!). Moving forward, full transcriptions of d’Holbach’s translations and editions, respectively marked as Ds and Fs in Vercruysse’s bibliography, will be added, making the database more worthy of its high-sounding name.  At the same time, we are also thinking about making Tout d’Holbach a bit less ‘d’Holbach’: adding to the database texts whose attribution to the Baron is highly controversial will put us, we hope, in a position to better understand the real contours of d’Holbach’s textual corpus, thus answering a question that has occupied scholars’ minds for more than two centuries.

Thanks to the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Voltaire Foundation is currently working on a born-digital critical edition of d’Holbach’s writings: Digital d’Holbach. Unlike Digital d’Holbach, Tout d’Holbach is not a critical edition: none of the texts is annotated, and the transcriptions, while broadly accurate, may contain occasional typos. Tout d’Holbach is a research tool, and one, we hope, that will prove invaluable to researchers collaborating on Digital d’Holbach as well as to scholars working on the European Enlightenment more broadly.

So, here is the link again for those of you who haven’t yet given in to temptation and already clicked on it: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/tout-d-holbach

P.S. If you have some time to spare while you #stayathome and would like to contribute to the project by checking the transcription of a section of one of d’Holbach’s works, or if you would like to know more about Digital d’Holbach, please email Ruggero Sciuto at ruggero.sciuto@voltaire.ox.ac.uk and likewise if you would like to know more about Digital d’Holbach!

Ruggero Sciuto and Clovis Gladstone

 

This post is re-blogged from https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/.