Digital Voltaire
Building on the Voltaire Foundation’s existing expertise in producing print critical editions, this project explores the challenges of producing high-quality scholarly editions digitally. In a first phase, we will produce digital prototypes of critical editions of Voltaire based on the Complete Works of Voltaire, now near completion on paper.
The work that needs to be done in the first phase of this project, is twofold:
(1) Modelling the scholarly digital edition. In order to explore the possibilities of a definitive scholarly digital edition, we will prototype Voltaire’s texts based on the Complete Works of Voltaire. Digital Voltaire is an archival edition, in contrast to Digital d’Holbach, which is also part of the larger Digital Enlightenment project, but a born-digital edition.
(2) To plan in detail the creation and development of a new digital resource and editing platform in the second phase of Digital Voltaire. This new resource will build upon, expand, and connect existing projects in Oxford that have hitherto remained disparate. As such, it will:
- include not only correspondences (as does Electronic Enlightenment at present), but also texts, so as to give its users a fuller experience of early-modern literary and scientific culture
- Explore dynamic links with other early modern digital projects in oxford, including Electronic Enlightenment, Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online and Women’s Early Modern Letters Online
- allow for the publication and exploration of born-digital material as well as archival editions
- provide an innovative infrastructure that will allow for the uploading and annotation of new materials, and therefore offer to its users a constantly growing research tool
