In the digital age, how can we enhance our approach to literary research with digital techniques to bring it off the page and onto the screen?

That was the question presented to our team at Open Creative Communications, a division of TVF Communications, by the Voltaire Foundation in 2023. The Voltaire Foundation had recently finished work on The Complete Works of Voltaire, a 205 volume collection of the works of the prolific French Enlightenment writer. This was a 50-year project to collate his books, plays, essays, letters and commentary, along with editorial content and analysis, all together in one place for the first time.

Next, Professor Nicholas Cronk and the team at Oxford wanted to continue this work by bringing the collection to a digital format. Not only did they want all the content of the complete works to be available online, but they wanted to explore ways of using technology to enhance the content and how users interact with it. The goal of the project was to create a scholarly edition that would become the definitive edition of The Complete Works of Voltaire and set a new standard for digital research.

Designing and building a new digital standard

We worked closely with the Voltaire Foundation team to design the site structure and framework from the very beginning. We developed the platform branding, iconography and page design, as well as planning the UX and user journeys for users to access and interact with the content. We were also tasked with processing the XML and metadata of the collection, created by Dan Barker (dancan Ltd), as we built the platform around this content.

Through our Agile development cycle and constant collaboration with the team at the Voltaire Foundation, we have created a platform with the following key features:

• Presentation of the core content in a clean continuous view. Content previously in footnotes and appendices can be integrated directly into the main text with toggleable visibility. This includes marked up variants of text, with information about witnesses of variants.
• Ability to generate citations for both the platform and the original print edition. This includes generating short links to specific pages of content. Alternatively, users can quickly follow references for both the print and digital collection by entering a page reference from anywhere on the site.
• Advanced search functionality, allowing users to find connections between search terms and apply combinations of filters
• Tracking Voltaire’s letters through time, both in terms of a specific correspondence or in terms of all letters
• Markup of key persons, places and events mentioned throughout the collection, with ability to track number of mentions across works

The platform, named Oxford University Voltaire, formally launched at the end of 2025 in partnership with Liverpool University Press.

Looking ahead

We will be continuing our collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation and developing Oxford University Voltaire further. In 2026, we are planning the following key additions:

• Addition of Voltaire’s marginalia notes of other writer’s works
• Integration of databases of Voltaire’s libraries and manuscripts, as well as a new database of iconography of Voltaire
• Using the content model to expand the collection to include content from other Enlightenment figures, such as d’Holbach and Graffigny

Click here to find out more about the platform