ARTFL Project: Frequently Asked Questions

Contents

Can I obtain copies of texts from ARTFL?
Can individuals or institutions outside of North America become ARTFL subscribers?
Can individuals subscribe to ARTFL?
Is ARTFL available on CD-ROM?
How much does an ARTFL subscription cost?
Why can't I get pages of some modern works?
How large is the ARTFL database?
How can I contact ARTFL for more information
What Happened to PhiloLogic?
Can I access ARTFL from my Internet Service Provider?
How can I tell what my IP number or machine name is?

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Can I obtain copies of texts from ARTFL?

No. We do not distribute any texts from our databases to individual users or institutions under any circumstance. ARTFL is strictly prohibited from distributing texts under the terms of our collaboration with the
Institut national de la langue française.

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Can individuals or institutions outside of North America become ARTFL subscribers?

No. Access to the TLF database outside of North America is provided by the Institut national de la langue française under the Frantext system on the World Wide Web or through Minitel (the French digital network). INaLF can be contacted at:

INaLF - Institut national de la langue française
ENS de St-Cloud
Avenue de la Grille du Parc
92211 ST-CLOUD Cedex
Tél. 01.41.12.35.45
Fax 01.41.12.35.10

WWW: http://www.ciril.fr/INALF

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Can individuals subscribe to ARTFL?

Our agreement with the Institut national de la langue française specifies that only persons associated with educational or research institutions may use the database. Thus, we cannot provide access to the ARTFL database to individuals who are not students, staff or faculty at North American research institutions. We have received many requests from individuals not associated with appropriate institutions for access to the ARTFL database. We are actively studying providing ARTFL access to high schools and individuals with representatives of the French government. We encourage subscription requests from anyone interested in ARTFL so that we can further examine our current subscription policies and make recommendations for modifying these policies to the Institut national de la langue française.

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Is ARTFL available on CD-ROM?

The ARTFL database and search engines are not available on CD-ROM. The Institut national de la langue française, in conjunction with Hachette, has released a CD-ROM of more than 300 19th century texts on CD-ROM for MS-DOS computers titled Discotext 1. It features an easy to use interface and very powerful searching and reporting capabilities. Further information on Discotext 1 is available from:

Alain Pierrot
Hachette Education
79, boulevard Saint Germain
75006 Paris
(1) 46-34-82-90

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How much does an ARTFL subscription cost?

ARTFL charges $500 per year for institutions which have doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences, $250 per year for all other post secondary educational institutions. An institutional subscription allows all members of the institution -- faculty, students, staff and other affiliated members -- unlimited access under any of our access programs. There are no additional charges for using ARTFL with the sole (and unused) option of printing search results at ARTFL and having them sent by surface mail ($0.15 per page).

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Why can't I get pages of some modern works?

Our agreement with the Institut national de la langue française limits the amount of context we can display (300 characters) for each citation in works protected by French copyright law. Works protected by French copyrights are indicated by the Copyright tag in bibliographic and word search reports.

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How large is the ARTFL database?

The basic database contains about 115 million words and occupies about 750 MB. Additional databases contain about 10-15 million words.

The following tables indicate the composition of the Main ARTFL database (1,880 texts) by century and genre and show the size of the database by number of words by century.


                             Table One

      Breakdown  of  1880  titles  in  the  ARTFL database by
      century of publication and type of text.

 Type of text    12-16th  17th    18th    19th    20th
 ------------------------------------------------------------

 travel accounts            5       7      10       7
 novels                    31     129     173     199
 treatise                  61     116      81      73
 eloquence                 13       6       2       0
 memoires                   8       9      46      59

 correspondance            31      15      40       4
 collections                4      32      17      25
 pamphlets                  4       6       2       0

 poetry             1      63      43      79      42
 theater            2     114     110      76     103
 unclassified      13      15       0       2       2
 =================================================================
 Total by Year     16     349     473     528     514   1880



                             Table Two

           Total number  of  words  (tokens)  and unique
           words  (types)  in  the ARTFL database broken
           down by century.

           1100-1499 -- TOKENS:     47136  TYPES:    n/a
           1500-1599 -- TOKENS:    203711  TYPES:   23775
           1600-1699 -- TOKENS:  15403287  TYPES:  153419
           1700-1799 -- TOKENS:  27739541  TYPES:  159041
           1800-1899 -- TOKENS:  39508562  TYPES:  219260
           1900-1964 -- TOKENS:  31870355  TYPES:  198192
           ==============================================
            TOTAL    -- TOKENS: 114772592  TYPES:  439191

Click here for a list of the top 100 authors in the ARTFL database by number of titles.

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How can I contact ARTFL for more information

The best way to contact ARTFL is by e-mail. Send e-mail mark@barkov.uchicago.edu which currently goes to Mark Olsen. You can phone ARTFL at the University of Chicago (773) 702-8488 or send surface mail to:

ARTFL Project
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
1050 East 59th Street
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637

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What Happened to PhiloLogic?

PhiloLogic, our old terminal based client is now running in an essentially unsupported mode. Originally developed in the late 1980s, it has been entirely superceeded by the client functionality of World Wide Web browsers. While we will provide PhiloLogic accounts to individuals at subscribing institutions, we strongly encourage users to access ARTFL under the World Wide Web. We plan to discontinue PhiloLogic access to ARTFL completely early in 1997 unless we hear from users who might want us to continue keeping it running for a while longer.

If you still want a PhiloLogic account, please contact ARTFL at mark@gide.uchicago.edu. Please consult PhiloLogic documentation and/or Jeff Graf's short introduction to ARTFL and PhiloLogic for Indiana University for a system description and requirements.

Connect to the ARTFL Database Under PhiloLogic (userid and password for artfl.uchicago.edu required).

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Can I access ARTFL from my Internet Service Provider account?

You can't accomplish this through the ARTFL homepage, but you may be able to do it via proxy server. Proxy servers are set up through your home institution; check with your library or humanities computing department to see what's available for dial-up connections to your college or university. University of Chicago users can use the University's proxy server; compelete instructions are to be found at http://www-neteng.uchicago.edu/Docs/web-proxy.html.

ARTFL does not currently provide a mechanism, such as a password protected version of ARTFL, for allowing individuals from subscribing institutions to connect to the ARTFL databases. We have adopted this policy because the most effective way for us to determine who is a legitimate user -- an individual affiliated with a subscribing institution -- is to restrict access to institutional network domains, such as *.uchicago.edu. ARTFL does not have an independent way to determine who is affiliated with an institution nor when an individual leaves an institution.

There is a very helpful discussion of the problems posed by remote access by Ira H. Fuchs, Chief Scientist for the JSTOR Project, Remote Authentication and Authorization for JSTOR, in which he concludes that

Campuses must establish authentication schemes. Without authentication, even the most straight-forward access schemes exclude legitimate members of the campus community and run the risk of jeopardizing site licenses as well as participation in inter-campus agreements that may offer significant financial benefits.
JSTOR also provides a modified version of Professor Fuchs' paper, Options for Remote Authentication, with examples of proxy servers running at several campuses in North America.

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How can I tell what my IP number or machine name is?

Access to ARTFL is governed by the network name or IP number of the requesting computer. Typically, WWW browsers send both a network name, such as barkov.uchicago.edu and an IP number 128.135.126.76. To determine the name and number of your computer, please click on:
http://gide.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/printenv
and e-mail the results to mark@barkov.uchicago.edu. The REMOTE_ADDR indicates your IP number and the REMOTE_HOST indicates your computer's network name.

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Mark Olsen, ARTFL, University of Chicago, mark@gide.uchicago.edu