PROJECT HISTORY AND PROGRESS

This project dates from July 2016, when four of the founding members of the team attended a week-long digital liberal arts workshop at Colorado College. While developing the website, we spent much of the next five years designing, constructing, and improving the database. It took time to understand the complexity of the work, to define fields for all the quantitative and qualitative information to be extracted from the documents, to resolve textual and technical issues, and to test the relational Nodegoat software, created by a team of Humanists in the Netherlands.  

The team’s work in progress includes the following tasks:

1. Proofread, correct, and publish transcriptions of the original French documents from 1781 included in the edition of commissaire Foucault’s reports available in this website;

2. Write and publish additional contextual essays;

3. Enhance the website;

4. Maintain the bibliography;

5. Locate remaining dossiers in the Archives of the Bastille (1751-54, 1756-59, 1761-64, 1766-67) and other series;

6. Construct mechanisms to enable the manipulation, mapping, and visualization of data;

7. Continue to input data (1781 in progress)