Online dictionaries

Traditional publishers are trying to compete with online services, and there are many dictionaries and encyclopedias out there trying to figure how to survive in the age of Wikipedia. Some established dictionary publishers have decided to put their tools on the web for all to use.

Larousse.com has 5 of its French dictionaries of various flavors, as well as translation dictionaries and its encyclopedia all available for you to use. The interface is easy and clear, and there are hyperlinks from article to article and between works. The encyclopedia does have user-contributed content, which is identified as such. http://www.larousse.com/

Treccani, the publisher of the Enciclopedia italiana and the unfinished Dizionario biografico degli italiani, has decided to put them up on the web. The biographical dictionary had been plodding along very very slowly, and one hope is that users will contribute to entries so that it finally arrives to the letter "Z". The site also has access to a wide variety of Italian dictionaries, and a nice widget that you can download to your toolbar that allows you to search either in a dictionary or its online encyclopedia. Moreover, from the encyclopedia entries, you can double click on each word to get to its definition. The site is pretty cluttered, but the search boxes (vocabolario and enciclopedie) should be obvious. http://www.treccani.it/Portale/homePage.html

There are many similar initiatives. Others of special notice are Garzanti linguistica (free with registration), and le Grand Robert online, for which Stanford has a subscription.

le patromoine numerique = the continuing saga

Sarkozy has just announced that the French state will contribute over $1.1 billion towards the digitization of France's cultural heritage, in its ongoing attempt to keep control over this heritage while also bringing it to the multitudes through new technologies and taking into account financial realities. For the NY Times article on the subject, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/world/europe/15france.html

MANIOC - digital library of Caribbean materials

MANIOC has recently been launched. This is a digital library focusing on the Caribbean, Amazon, and the Guianas which aims to preserve the cultural history of this region. It contains primary and secondary texts, audio and video files of conferences and interviews, and images which document the history, culture, politics, and economics of this area. There is also a catalog of scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers about the region held in research libraries in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, and a link to the digital version of Etudes caribéennes

While the content is currently limited, I hope that it will grow. In the future, materials in MANIOC will also be accessible through Gallica. This is a resource to know and follow about for those of you working on the francophone Caribbean.

http://www.manioc.org/

Another one

Following on the heels of the last post, yesterday I was amused to see that we had just received Valery Giscard-d'Estaing's new novel:

Giscard d'Estaing, Valéry. La princesse et le président: roman. Paris: Fallois, 2009.

The subject, a romance between the President of France and a British princess. Hopefully it won't win the Bad Sex prize. From the passage on the back cover, it looked a bit too demure for that. Find out for yourself, it should be in the stacks soon.

Commentaire and plot synopsis in Le Figaro...

New Prize for Les Bienveillantes

After winning the Prix Goncourt in 2006, Jonathan Littell's book has just been awarded the 17th annual "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" from the UK's Literary Review.

For more on this prize, and the passage that convinced the judges, see:
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsex.html