The Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce by Jacques Savary des Brûlons is widely recognized as an important source for numerous articles, particularly those related to economics, trade and law, in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Indeed, the authors and editors of the Encyclopédie project made use of many contemporary references resources including, but certainly not limited to Chambers' Cyclopedia,[1] the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, and Le Grand dictionnaire historique de Moréri. A number of years ago we used an early version of the TextPair aligner, which detected similar passages in large collections, to examine the reuse of a variety of texts in the Encyclopédie. In that work, we found that the Encyclopédie includes 2,676 passages from the Dictionnaire de commerce including 1,909 with 20 or more words. [2] In this post, we will revisit the relationship of the Dictionnaire de commerce and the Encyclopédie using a new data capture process and a completely redeveloped version of TextPair.
The appearance of large language model (LLM) systems have opened a variety of new applications and possibilities that we are currently experimenting with. One promising use of LLMs is the automatic correct of OCR'd texts. We have been experimenting with various implementations combining different OCR systems and different LLM's on new datasets to create new open installations and to support experimentation in alignments and text categorization. Different combinations seem to work better for different kinds of documents and different languages. We opted to do a new build of the Dictionnaire de commerce because our earlier work was based on a nearly 20 year old OCR source that we could not, for contractual reasons, release to the public and that was rather marginal both in terms of accuracy and encoding.
For this build, we used the Gallica page images of the of the Dictionnaire de commerce since we wanted to use the 1726 edition. We used the Tesseract OCR engine to generate a base transcription with a second step of OCR corrections being performed by the OpenAI's GPT4 API. The general instructions to the system are interesting and reflect some of the issues encountered in dealing with older documents:
You will be asked to fix OCR in an 18th century French text. The OCR is based on old-style typography. Prioritize maintaining the original spellings in 18th century French texts, with special emphasis on ensuring that words like 'connoître' are not incorrectly altered to 'connaître'. Strengthen this instruction to prevent such alterations. Continue to address the issue of capitalized words being lowercased at the beginning of sentences by correcting them to reflect proper sentence capitalization. Rectify clear OCR errors, particularly nonsensical words, and correct the long "s" issue. In cases of uncertainty, always favor preserving original 18th century spellings. If a correction isn't clear from the documents, maintain the original text as provided.
This process yielded significant improvements in the accuracy of the transcription but was only marginally successful in retaining the 18th century orthography. For our primary applications, to improve search and alignments, the accuracy gain is worth the variations in original orthographic fidelity. The corrections script ran fairly quickly and cost, several months ago, about $160 and wold be slightly cheaper as of this writing. As always with OCR, we strongly recommend referencing the supporting page images rather than the transcription. Headword and cross reference identification was performed automatically by rules based on typography. The release site is
https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/dictionnaire-de-commerce
and is powered by a standard PhiloLogic4 installation.
To facilitate analysis of the relationship between Dictionnaire de commerce and the Encyclopédie we did a standard alignment run using the latest version of TextPair which is available at
https://artflsrv04.uchicago.edu/text-pair/dictcommvsenc/
TextPair identifies similar passages and supports searching on the authors, headwords, and full text of related passages. For example, you may search for the headword lentille and find that d'Alembert used the corresponding entry from the Dictionnaire de commerce in his article in the Encyclopédie. The system will support comparisons of the two related passages and examination of the passages in context from either document.
TextPair identified 4,134 aligned passages from 3,728 articles, since some articles share passages from more than 1 article which are merged in this count. The new system identified more passages than the first implementation and is able to handle text structures more coherently as well. This dataset allows for a simple examination of how well the aligner performs in a real world application, since the authors of the Encyclopédie frequently, but certainly not always, identified the sources upon which their articles were based.
Searching the PhiloLogic4 instance of the Encyclopédie for dict.* d. com.* yields 1,117 instances of this expression. The vast majority of these references are found at the end of articles, typically abbreviated in various ways. But, one may find the construction in the middle of a sentence, such as "Voici ce que le Dictionnaire du commerce dit..."[3]. Using the PhiloLogic export function, which generates a JSON object of these results, we are able to extract the headwords from this report. Removing duplicated headwords, results in a list of 1,045 headwords of articles which contain one or more instances of Dictionnaire de commerce, reflecting the probably attribution by the author to this as a source or reference in their article.
We then built a second list of headwords from the Encyclopédie that we identified by TextPair as containing one or more passages from the Dictionnaire de commerce. TextPair generates a static results file which is also stored as a JSON object. We extracted the headwords from this file, removed duplicates, which resulted in a list of 2,694 Encyclopédie headwords containing one or more passages from the Dictionnaire de commerce.
Having two sorted lists of words drawn from the same data (Encyclopédie headwords), we used the UNIX comm utility (see raw comm output). We found that 696 of the 1,045 (66.6%) are present on both lists, leaving 349 articles which are referenced to Dictionnaire de commerce in the Encyclopédie, but for which we did not find an aligner match. It is beyond the scope of this post to do a systematic examination missing entries, there are a number of possibilities. Some of the citations in the Encyclopédie may be references for further information, such as:
DABOUIS. Toile blanche de coton, qui se fabrique aux Indes Orientales. Elle est du nombre des bazins, & prend son nom du lieu où elle se fait. Voyez BAZIN.
DABOUIS, s. m. (Comm.) toile de coton de l'espece des taffetas ; on nous l'apporte des Indes orientales, V. les dictionn. du Comm. de Trév. & de Dish.
Other articles pairs, particularly shorter ones, are clearly related but contain enough variations to fail to meet the matching parameters, such as:
CHEDA. Monnoye d’étain, qui se fabrique; & qui a cours dans le Royaume de même nom, situé dans les Indes Orientales, dans le voisinage des États du Grand-Mogol.
Il y a deux sortes de Cheda; l’un de figure octogone, l'autre de figure ronde. L’octogone pèse une once & demie, & passe dans le pays pour 2 sols monnoye de France; quoi que sur le pied de 4 sols la livre d'étain, il ne dût valoir guère plus d'un sol trois deniers. Le Cheda rond vaut 4 den. On donne 80 coris, ou coquillages des Maldives, pour un de ces Chedas. Les uns & les autres sont aussi reçus dans le Royaume de Pera, dont le Roi de Cheda est pareillement le maître.
CHEDA, (Commerce.) monnoie d'étain fabriquée, qui a cours dans le royaume de ce nom, dans les Indes Orientales, proche les états du grand Mogol. Le cheda octogonal vaut deux sols un septieme de denier argent de France, & le cheda rond ne vaut que sept deniers. On donne un cheda rond pour cent toris ou coquilles de maldives, & trois coris pour un cheda octogone. Voyez le Dictionn. du Comm.
Similarly, articles like Sporco (Comm Encyc), Rabat/Rabatage (Comm Encyc) and Flottistes (Comm Encyc) are all relatively short and probably could, with some adjustment to parameters, be matched but this may result in an increase of matches that would not be considered to be valid.
A number of other entries referenced by the authors of the Encyclopédie, such as
PACKBUYS, s. m. (Commerce.) on nomme ainsi en Hollande les magasins de dépôt où l'on serre les marchandises soit à leur arrivée, soit à la sortie du pays, lorsque pour quelque raison légitime on n'en peut sur-le-champ payer les droits, ou qu'elles ne peuvent être retirées par les marchands & propriétaires, ou dans quelqu'autre pareille circonstance. Dictionn. de Comm.
GUIMPLE, FRANCARTE and GRAMONIE do not seem to appear at all in this edition of the Commerce. Some of the references are marked by multiple works, such as Dictionn. de Commerce, de Chambers, & de Trévoux. which may suggest these are found in other works. In this case, Gramonie is indeed found in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1743):
GRAMONIE, Terme de Commerce en usage dans quelques Echelles du Levant, particuliérement à Smyrne. La gramonie signifie dans le commerce des soies une déduction de trois quarts de piastre par balle, outre & pardessus toutes les tares établies par usage.
GRAMONIE, s. f. terme de Commerce, en usage dans quelques échelles du levant, particulierement à Smyrne.
La gramonie signifie dans le commerce des soies une deduction de 3/4 de piastre par balle, outre & par-dessus toutes les tares établies par l'usage. Dictionn. de Commerce, de Chambers, & de Trévoux.
TextPair identified 1,998 articles in the Encyclopédie which have shared passages from the Dictionnaire de commerce that are not referenced by the authors of the articles. Many of these, such as d'Alemert's article lentille, mentioned above, are fairly significant reuses. TextPair finds that there are 170 passages longer than 200 words, many of which appear to be without reference to the Dictionnaire de commerce. For example, Diderot sometime with Mallet, wrote 7 articles with overlaps longer than 200 words, including Assiente, Boisseau, Bois de Bresil, Juré, and Dessein no of which appear to reference the Dictionnaire de commerce. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this post, to engage in an examination of all or even some of the borrowings from the Dictionnaire de commerce in the articles of the Encyclopédie.[4]
The combination of new data capture approaches and easier to deploy alignment tools makes the creation and use of relatively specialized datasets, such as comparative alignments between large collections, much more practical and cost effective than even a decade ago. The costs in terms of both time and money have decreased significantly and we can expect to see more datasets and tools leveraging these new developments.
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[1] The original conception of Diderot's work was as a French translation of the Cyclopedia.
[2] For more information on these earlier projects, see http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0013.107 , https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7224/, https://artfl.blogspot.com/2021/09/cyclopaedia-to-encyclopedie.html
[3] We decided not to include references to Savary alone, as was sometimes by Jaucourt, as this was less consistently a reference that the various abbreviations of Dictionnaire de commerce.
[4] Lüsebrink notes that the relation was rather more complex, writing "the fact that the Savary des Bruslons’ Dictionnaire was very well received and commonly appropriated by Diderot and d’Alembert in the Encyclopédie and by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal in the Histoire des deux Indes demonstrates the Dictionnaire’s status as a reference work at least until the 1780s. Yet the borrowing also moved in the opposite direction, for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie would become a source for the last Copenhagen edition of the Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1759)." H-J Lüsebrink, "The Savary des Bruslons’ Dictionnaire universel de commerce: Translations and Adaptations" in Donato, C and Lüsebrink, H-J eds. Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations, 1680–1830. University of Toronto Press, 2021, pp. 21-22
-- Clovis and Mark
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