Textual typology : a thesaurus of textual genres

With the emergence and subsequent rise of digital editions, a polyphonic situation arises, posing a problem: the identification of resources using automated tools can be hindered due to the lack of a common framework for the typological description of textual resources. This observation prompted some members of the Consortium-HN CAHIER (Huma-Num) to create a "Textual typology" working group, aimed at developing a thesaurus for describing various types of literary texts. This consortium, which encompassed over sixty projects of digital edition and digitization of authorial corpora from various periods and intellectual backgrounds, exhibited significant heterogeneity in its productions, accompanied by highly enriched metadata. However, the keywords used to describe these objects (whether through Dublin Core in Omeka or in the headers - teiHeaders - of XML/TEI files) lack uniformity.

The "Textual Typology" working group undertook the development of a reference thesaurus for genres and types of texts, drawing from the terms used in the projects and conducting a systematic review of various lists of literary concepts. The construction of the "Textual Typology" thesaurus thus proceeded in several stages, aiming to provide a conceptually, lexically, and semantically rich tool to meet the needs of our knowledge domains.