Allen, Timothy (Author)
Cooney, Charles (Author)
Douard, Stéphane (Author)
Horton, Russell (Author)
Morrissey, Robert (Author)
Olsen, Mark (Author)
Roe, Glenn (Author)
Voyer, Robert (Author)
Journal of the Association for History and Computing
Volume: 13
Edition Details: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0013.107
Language: English
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers stands as one of the crowning achievements of the French Enlightenment. This monumental work, containing some 77,000 articles written by no less than 140 contributors, was published in Paris between 1751 and 1772 in seventeen in-folio volumes of text and eleven volumes of engravings. As with all reference works, the authors and editors of the Encyclopédie made extensive use of a vast array of contemporary reference works and scholarship to complete their massive compendium of enlightened knowledge. The identification of sources material used by the philosophes is a massive undertaking in itself, as the authors rarely acknowledged the works upon which they relied in writing their contributions. This paper describes two different experiments to identify sources of the Encyclopédie. The first applies the "Vector Space Model" (VSM) to identify articles that may have been borrowed from the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1743) -- an intellectual rival of the Encyclopédie compiled by French Jesuits in the first half of the 18th century. We find that the Vector Space Model can be an effective means of identifying "similar" passages in documents, in this case, potentially borrowed articles that were then examined by human evaluators. Overall, we conclude that 5.32 percent of all of the articles in the Encyclopédie that were examined were borrowed from the Jesuit critics of the philosophes. The second experiment, building on the first, applies what we call Pairwise Alignment of Intertextual Relations (PAIR) to detect passages borrowed from another important predecessor of the Encyclopédie, Louis Moréri's popular Grand dictionnaire historique (1671-1759), which was also a product of Jesuit scholarship. Given the genealogical character of the Moréri dictionary, which represented an understanding of knowledge radically different than that of the encyclopédistes, we were nonetheless able to identify more than 400 shared passages between the two works using the PAIR approach. These findings shed new light on the composition process of the Encyclopédie and suggest that the intellectual battle lines between the Jesuits and the philosophes may not have been as firmly established as previously understood. We conclude by outlining improvements to both the VSM and PAIR models, which we expect will make further identification of similar passages more effective.
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