Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1992 08:24:20 CDT
From:         Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
Subject:      FRANTEXT Database, Pt. 1 of 2

From: Jack Kessler <kessler@well.sf.ca.us>
Subject:  FRANTEXT Database, Pt. 1 of 2

I've asked around, and no one seems to have heard either of FRANTEXT or
of its North American incarnation, ARTFL. 2500 major French language
fulltexts online, armed with "absolute and relative term occurrence
frequency" statistics for information scientists to ponder, would seem
to be a pretty interesting and valuable resource for a lot of folks.
What follows, then, is my own translation of a fascinating forthcoming
article on FRANTEXT, details on reaching both FRANTEXT and ARTFL, and
information about a new fulltext book which may be of great interest to
librarians, French students, information scientists, rare book
scholars, and network hackers alike. Joyeux Noe:l.  *<:-)}

Jack Kessler
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
_________________________

"The Point of View of a FRANTEXT User: FRANTEXT at the
Bibliothe`que Publique d'Information" (citation appears below)
by Jacques Lemarignier, BPI, Paris (with permission)

FRANTEXT has been in use for five years at the Bibliothe`que Publique
d'Information. It has attracted a very diverse following, composed
essentially of students, professors, researchers, and professionals
from the worlds of cinema, publishing, and advertising. Great numbers
of users have been able to pose questions of great variety -- in their
complexity, their level of difficulty, the object of their search
(doctoral or master's thesis, publication in an anthology, simple
curiousity) -- and they have greatly appreciated the results obtained.

This impressive output can be explained by the remarkable flexibility
of the software, which can adapt itself to such a variety of questions.
It might be interesting to recount these many possibilities, placing
ourselves in the point of view of the user, who can translate a
question into search terms and use all of the resources of FRANTEXT to
surmount any difficulties found. The choice of several examples of
increasing complexity will help us comprehend what one can obtain from
this database:

The search for a quotation is the simplest and fastest operation.  If
it is found in one of the 2500 texts of the corpus -- which is not
always the case -- one can identify it in several seconds. In addition
to amazing the user, one renders her a great service.

A documentalist from Gallimard publishers, who is preparing an edition
of the correspondance of Drieu La Rochelle, had looked in vain for a
phrase cited without a reference in one of the letters:

"Il tenait a l'affu^t les douze ou quinze sens
Qu'un faune peut braquer sur les plaisirs passants"

In an instant these two lines were retrieved on the screen of the
terminal, with the citation to their source, Victor Hugo, _La le'gende
des sie`cles_, "Le Satyr", and the page of the cited edition.

A film-maker was struck in her childhood by a poem which she wished to
use for a scene in a film, but she could remember only a single verse
with any accuracy, and she had forgotten entirely both the author's
name and the title. With the same ease, FRANTEXT showed her that the
verse was taken from one of the _Poe`mes barbares_ of Leconte de Lisle,
"Les elfes".

FRANTEXT also can render appreciable and rapid service in illuminating
the history of a word. It is believed that "ordinateur" is a recent
word, derived from the invention of the electronic calculator. But a
search for this word on FRANTEXT shows us immediately an older use:

"The insufficiency of all purely mechanical solutions is a new motive
for us to resort to a pre-established arrangement. Why should we make
such vain and ridiculous efforts to show ourselves as being the
*ordinateur*? Is it not always necessary that the collection of
secondary causes points at last to a resolution in the first cause, of
which the sublime and consoling idea so entirely satisfies and
completes the heart and the spirit?"

--Charles Bonnet, _Contemplation de la Nature_, 1764, page 267, part
seven.

Here the adjective "ordinateur" signifies the Supreme Being, reminding
us of the "Dieu horloger" of Voltaire. It is this word, fallen into
dis-use, which has been taken up, two centuries later, to translate the
English word "computer". These later occurrences begin in the year
1960, using the modern definition. In 1964 one already speaks of an
"ordinateur e'lectronique" (_Histoire ge'ne'rale des sciences_, t.3,
vol.2, 1964, page 108). Then the examples multiply, and the word
becomes common.

Searches of the same type, for uncommon meanings or usage of words,
often are of great interest. If one is interested in the concept of
"Lumie`res", for example, which is used to characterize the entire 18th
century, now called the "Sie`cle des Lumie`res", FRANTEXT shows us that
its intensive use extends from 1750 to 1850, with no pause at 1799. The
following table, of word-occurrence frequencies by chronological eras
of twenty years, can be obtained in less than a minute:
____________________________________________________________

NOTE: relative frequencies are expressed in millionths

Total absolute frequency: 3226
Maximum frequency: 652, in the period 1780-1799

DIAGRAM OF ABSOLUTE FREQUENCIES
Scale: an asterisk represents an absolute frequency of 20
occurences

               abs. rel.
               freq.freq.
1700-1719:      41   17  ***
1720-1739:      55    9  ***
1740-1759:     246   36  **************
1760-1779:     460   46  *************************
1780-1799:     652   86  **********************************
1800-1819:     517   93  ***************************
1820-1839:     479   43  *************************
1840-1859:     315   26  *****************
1860-1879:     278   24  ***************
1880-1899:     183   18  **********
____________________________________________________________

The absolute frequency represents the number of usages of the term
"lumie`res" in the texts of the corpus, divided up by periods of 20
years; the relative frequency is the relation between the number of
usages in the texts considered and the total number of words in these
same texts. Thus, in the period 1780-1799, "lumie`res" is used 652
times in the texts of the corpus of FRANTEXT: that is the absolute
frequency. Dividing by 652 the total number of words of the texts for
this period, one obtains 86 millionths: that is the relative
frequency.

The figures and the diagram show us the immense increase in usage of
the term "lumie`res" up to 1799, notably in the last 20 years of the
18th century, then the slow and steady diminution of its use.  One
clearly sees the influence of the term "lumie`res" during the French
Revolution, and the persistence of this influence during the Second
Empire and the Restoration.

Another table, obtained just as rapidly, can show the absolute and
relative frequencies of the term for each author of the same period,
except for those authors who didn't use the term at all.  Between 1750
and 1800 the authors who made greatest use of the term are not those of
whom one first would think: the Abbe' Pre'vost (144 usages), the Abbe'
Barthe'le'my (138 usages), the Abbe' Ge'rard (104 usages), Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre (101 usages), Diderot (89 usages), Condorcet (82 usages).
This shows that, if the ideas of the "Lumie`res" were developed by
philosophers who are famous today, they were taken into the language
and popularised largely by writers who are less known or nearly
forgotten today, but who had, in their time, a very great influence,
and who played an essential role in the preparation of the Revolution.
Between 1800 and 1850, when Madame de Stae:l and Chateaubriand come to
the fore, with respectively 194 and 160 usages, the concept of
"Lumie`res" becomes fixed in the popular imagination and takes on a
mythical value.

Subject-searching is more complexe, but FRANTEXT has such flexibility
that the result is excellent. If one is searching within the works of a
single author, or within a single work, it is enough to enumerate the
terms which define the theme. Thus, in a study of the color "blanche"
in _Madame Bovary_, one first automatically searches all the words
formed on the terms "blanc" and "pa^le"; to this list one may add
"blafard", "livide", ble^me", "cadave'reux", "neige", "lumie`re",
"immacule'", "candeur". From the result appears an evolution from
lively colors, often contrasting, through to pale and livid hues,
paralleling the gradual fall of Emma into suicide and nothingness.

As shown by its 218 examples, the color "blanche" has great importance
and symbolic value. At first it signifies health, propriety, elegance,
beauty, purity. When Charles sees Emma for the first time, he first
notices the whiteness of her fingernails, which surprises him; "her
hand was not beautiful, in fact it was perhaps a bit pale"; as a
counterpoint, her eyes are brown and appear to be black, her look clear
and direct, "reaching you frankly, with a strong candour". The black
here is placed into a natural opposition, as a sign of life, of force
and of beauty. A few lines further, Charles gazes at "her neck which
extended from her black collar" and "her hair, for which the two black
ribbons seemed each to be of the same piece". A bit later, after a warm
spell which has melted the snow, Charles visits Emma, of whom "her
parasol, of gently reflective silk, blocking the sun, highlighted the
white skin of her figure with the play of its reflections" (I,2). Love
and happiness are associated with an intense and alive light, primarily
one that is pale and white.

During the early part of the marriage of Charles and Emma, one finds an
entire range of colors, from black to white, in an atmosphere of
happiness. Charles, "was staring at the sunlight, passing between the
bedcovers and her blonde hair"; her eyes, "black as shadow and deep
blue as daylight, contained layers of color which, in deeper hues in
the depths of her eyes, shone with enameled brightness on the surface"
(I,9).

A soon as Emma breaks through the sterile dream of this imagined ideal
world, the white and the black come to oppose themselves in the usual
way, thus, "Emma wished to live...like the ladies...who passed their
days ...in watching the approach from the depths of the country a
soldier with a white plume in his hat, galloping on his black horse"
(I,6). The world then becomes more pale, less real. White carries her
away, the image of her dream: "She wandered, her desperate eyes upon
the solitude of her life, searching for any white sail in the mists of
her horizon" (I,9).

The colors follow the movements of the soul of Emma in the novel.  The
progression from dream, to boredom, to disgust with life, to despair,
is expressed by the intrusion of pallor: the washed-out tint, the
whitened day, wan shades, the pale sky, the livid river; finally the
eyes of the corpse of Emma, "disappearing in a viscous pallor".

The minute examination of the 218 occurrences obtained, the report of
the text of the edition of Belles Lettres, for which the page is
indicated each time, enables the enrichment of these few remarks, the
precision of each nuance of color, their placement in relation to their
context. A study can obtain an exhaustive list of examples in twenty
minutes using FRANTEXT.

(Next: conclusion of Lemarignier's description of FRANTEXT, how
FRANTEXT and ARTFL may be reached online, and a new book on online
fulltext work in France.)

Jack Kessler
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
End of Part 1 of 2
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU