Sonnets base of the Oupoco project

The Oupoco Database is a collection of 4870 French sonnets developed in the framework of the Oupoco Project. The database is mainly composed of poems from the 19th and early 20th century. We have identified 767 authors: 4412 sonnets written by men (660), 439 sonnets written by women (107), which leaves 19 sonnets for which we have not been able to assign a female or male author. The sonnets come from different sources from the Internet, or not: we especially want to thank the Bibliothèque nationale de France (the French national library) that gave us access to a large corpus, from which we were able to extract an invaluable number of great poems. To all the sonnets is attached a specific license related to the source they come from, but all are freely available and can be re-used for free. This database has initially been developed for the Oupoco project (L'Ouvroir de littérature combinatoire, https://oupoco.org/), which consists in producing new sonnets by recombining verses from existing ones from the French literature, following the idea put forward by Queneau in his famous conceptual book: Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961). Different scripts have been developed for the Oupoco project (to analyse the rhymes and recombine the verses) which are not part of this data base but can be obtained by contacting the authors of the project. Beyond Oupoco, this database can be used for various purposes, for teaching and for research, especially in the following domains: literature studies, corpus linguistics, digital humanities, arts and technology, etc.