E-Processing of Historical Manuscripts Collections: A Project of the French Research Organization CNRS

We focus in this paper on a CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) project that involves a collection of texts more than 60 years old. This project is the Sources Chrétiennes collection, which assembles in 520 volumes various series of most valuable texts: early Christian, Greek Byzantine, medieval Latin, etc. The content of the texts is theological/historical or even philosophical. The collection is the only bilingual one among the various similar collections. That is, each manuscript is translated in French, no matter what the original language was. We can state, without reservation, that this project is unique —not only amongst French studies— but from a global perspective. Among the various innovative results of our work, we should note in particular the structural analysis of the collection, the hierarchical permutation of the collection’s content, the reordered representation of related information, etc. The information contained in this series is thus displayed in a way that demonstrates its great worth and impact on French and European/international studies.