About the platform

Welcome to our platform for digital scholarly editions, designed to have the same authoritative status as the very best print editions.

The first edition to be published on the platform is Oxford University Voltaire (OV), reproducing digitally the 205-volume Complete Works of Voltaire/Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1967–2022). Voltaire wrote prolifically in all literary genres, from prose to poems, from opera libretti to marginalia, making this corpus, in its volume, diversity and complexity, an ideal subject for constructing a digital edition that can be used as a model for other eighteenth-century authors, and even for writings from different periods and languages. The Voltaire edition will soon be joined by the first scholarly edition of the works of eighteenth-century materialist writer Paul Thiry, baron d'Holbach (under the direction of Dr Ruggero Sciuto), which will follow the model established for Voltaire. Further editions will be added in future.

The different textual elements (pages, lines, authorial notes, editorial notes, variant readings, appendices, etc.) are stable, and can be accessed via existing references to the print volumes; in turn the interface allows users to generate accurate and stable references to the digital edition, including DOIs. The platform includes advanced search, filter, browse and navigation functionality. In later stages of development, the semantic markup of the data will allow for an enhanced level of exploration of each writer's corpus, as well as sophisticated searches in the text, its variants, the annotation and other scholarly apparatus.

OV is a collaborative endeavour between the Voltaire Foundation, Open Creative Communications and dancan Ltd, and is sold by Liverpool University Press.

If you have any comments or suggestions for how the platform could be developed further, please get in touch with us at ov@voltaire.ox.ac.uk.