Oulipo Archival Transcription Project

The Project

As part of the scientific goals of the ANR DifdePo project, the “Documentation and Edition” part focuses on the development of an online, digital archive of the Oulipo’s monthly meeting minutes, and the promotion of academic research using these digitally enriched documents. Directed by Camille Bloomfield and Hélène Campaignolle-Catel with the technical expertise of Lou Burnard, this process had four main steps:

  1. Inventory and preparation of documents for digitization/choice of documents to transcribe
  2. The digitization of the documents
  3. The transcription in TEI of the digitized documents through a system of crowdsourcing
  4. The online publication of the digital archives and their transcriptions

You can find more information about this and other aspects of the project on their official website.

Personal Participation

  1. Assisted in the numbering of the documents and final preparation for digitization. Most notably from January-March 2015, served as an official “esclave de l’Oulipo,” having been given permission to access the archives by Marcel Bénabou. You can find these archives online at Gallica.
  2. Transcribed hundreds of documents, coordinated team of transcribers across three continents, helped develop a new style sheet, designed a new workflow for the project, divided into two primary stages (first, the simple transcription of the text into a Microsoft Word document; second, the “styling” of the document), validated the work of crowd-sourced transcribers.
  3. Self-taught XML-TEI to assist in the conversion of the transcribed documents in Oxygen.
  4. Assisted in the development of the website to house these transcribed documents.