PARES: Gaston Paris, des archives aux réseaux
Together with a small circle of like-minded individuals, Gaston Paris (1839-1903) promoted the institutionalisation of Romance Philology in France and had a formative influence on scholarship, education and culture. His central position in the intellectual landscape of his time is the result of his multifaceted career: he was a prolific scholar, a co-founder of philological series and journals – including the prestigious Romania –, a long-standing professor at the Collège de France and at the then-pioneering École Pratique des Hautes Études, as well as a member of important academic and educational institutions in the second half of the 19th century.
Gaston Paris left behind a rich legacy, which today is scattered across various libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Among the surviving documents are his numerous notebooks and an extensive collection of letters exchanged with some 1800 correspondents from around the world. These documents, which have to date only been partially researched, are a true treasure trove, offering insights into the history of Romance philology in the 19th century, as well as the broader scientific, intellectual, cultural and social life of the time.
The binational, Swiss-French Project PARES – funded by the SNSF and the ANR for a period of four years (2025-2029) – aims to bring together Gaston Paris’ legacy on a digital platform in accordance with the FAIR principles, making it accessible and usable, and to study and edit key parts of the material in light of specific research questions.
Digital Edition
Technical Tools
- Transkribus for automatic text recognition and definition/marking of text regions
- Heurist for creating the database
- TEI-Publisher for editing and publishing the XML TEI documents
- oXygen XML Editor for content annotation and commenting
- IIIF server in collaboration with: BnF, Humathèque Campus Condorcet, Collège de France, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France
- XSLT for transforming between different XML formats
- Python for various purposes such as reformatting, automation, etc.
- Huma-Num, including Kanboard and Sharedocs for internal team communication and collaboration
Usage Options
Every document of Gaston Paris’ legacy will be automatically transcribed and checked by trained staff. A targeted, research-specific selection of these documents will then be critically edited. All transcriptions will be made publicly accessible alongside the digitised originals and can be consulted via full-text search.
The edition data is to be archived in DaSCH for reuse.
The technical workflow will be documented.
The project is scheduled to encompass a workshop during spring semester 2026 at UZH and two international conferences, the first of which will take place in Paris in 2027 and the second will be hosted by UZH in 2028.
Project Responsability
Project management:
Prof. Dr. Ursula Bähler, Romanisches Seminar (RoSe), UZH
Dr. Muriel Jorge, Maîtresse de conférences in Language Sciences, Université Paris Cité – HTL
Project team:
Dr. Fanny Maillet (RoSe, research associate)
Dr. Claudia Tassone (RoSe, postdoc)
MA Reto Baumgartner (Science IT, IT expert)
Dr. Johannes Graën (Institute of Computational Linguistics, IT expert)
MA Vincent Paillusson (Université Paris Cité, IT expert)
BA Cécile Babey (RoSe, student assistant)
BA Melike Tursun (RoSe, student assistant)
Participating organizations/institutions:
- Romanisches Seminar, UZH
- Science IT, UZH
- Laboratoire Histoire des théories linguistiques (HTL), CNRS
- Université Paris Cité
- Center for Digital Editions & Edition Analytics, UZH
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Humathèque, Campus Condorcet
- Archives of the Collège de France
- Library of the Institut de France
- Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle