Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus
Summary: The Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus is a one-million-word collection of news text from the 1650s. This resource has been developed for the study of the language, journalism and history of the Commonwealth period.
Key Facts
Website: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/newsbooks
Funder: British Academy
Type of Activity: Academic Research - Externally Funded
Principal Investigator: Tony McEnery
Co-investigator: Andrew Hardie
Dept/Research Groups: University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL), Linguistics and English Language
Keywords: Corpus linguistics, Digital humanities, Early modern English, English, English language, Historical and diachronic corpora, Language, Linguistics, Seventeenth century, History, Humanities computing, Critical discourse analysis
Project Description
The origins of English journalism lie in the middle of the seventeenth century. During this period, a new form of publication referred to as newsbooks began to appear - the earliest ancestors of today's Press. Beginning in 2001, work has been undertaken in the Department of Linguistics and English Language to build an electronic version of some of these documents.
The Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus is a 1 million word collection of English newsbooks from the 1650s. It consists of two bodies of text. The first is the full run of one highly anomalous newsbook title, Mercurius Fumigosus. The second consists of a complete collection of every newsbook published in London between the middle of December 1653 and the end of May 1654. All the documents in the corpus were transcribed from the copies of the newsbooks preserved in the Thomason Tracts (bibliographical details on these periodicals are available through Early English Books Online).
The corpus is now complete, and avaialble through the Oxford Text Archive. Work is now under way to investigate text reuse, the conceptualisation of contemporaneity, and other aspects of early modern journalistic discourse, using the corpus.
Research Significance
Academic
Purpose of Research
Academic Research - Externally Funded
Project Funder
British Academy
The construction of the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus was funded by two grants from the British Academy, references SG-33825 and LRG-35423.