Data and Metadata for a Digital (Re)-Edition of a Corpus of Social Science Surveys. Le Play’s Les Ouvriers des deux mondes (1857–1930)
Résumé
This article presents a digital re-edition of Les Ouvriers des deux mondes (Workers of the Two Worlds), a collection of case studies reporting investigations on working-class families between 1842 and 1927. These fieldwork studies are of eminent methodological importance and provide a detailed and comparative overview of the economic and social conditions of these families in different countries and continents, with a particular focus on western Europe. The article discusses the challenges and strategies involved in cataloguing and digitizing this historically important collection. It explores the impact of publication interruptions on the continuity of the collection, highlighting the differences between the initial publications (1857–1862) and subsequent ones (1875, 1883–1913, 1927–1930). In addition, the study focuses on the digitization efforts and methodologies used to create a digital edition, emphasizing the importance of maintaining the collection’s intellectual and editorial coherence to highlight the significant ethnographic relationship between investigators and respondents. The digital edition facilitates access and scholarly analysis through structured data extraction and scientific encoding, using XML-TEI standard.