Wednesday, May 29, 2019

The French Revolution Digital Archive

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 public online. 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.


The Archives parlementaires is a chronologically-ordered edited collection of sources on the French Revolution. It was conceived in the mid 19th century as a project to produce a definitive record of parliamentary deliberations and also includes letters, reports, speeches, and other first-hand accounts from a great variety of published and archival sources. Because of copyright limitations, FRDA contains the AP volumes covering the years 1787-1794. The text of these volumes has been marked up using TEI so that speakers, places, dates, and terms in the published index can be easily found. Users can see both scanned images of the AP pages or just the texts.


The Images are composed of high-resolution digital images of approximately 14 000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects of the Revolution. These materials were selected, mainly from the collections of the Département des Estampes et de la photographie, but also from other BnF departments, and include thousands of images for the important collections entitled Hennin and De Vinck. Detailed metadata exists for the images, so that researchers can search by artist, subject, genre, and place.

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