Big data: EEBO and EEBO-TCP
If there is one major collection of historical writings of all kinds that is worth knowing about, it is Early English Books Online (EEBO).
One reason for this is that it is huge – perhaps about 1.2 billion words. It evolved over decades, and partly because of World War II. For our purposes, the key step in EEBO’s journey was when it started to be digitised, making it searchable by computer. That came about through an initiative involving the Text Creation Partnership, and hence the acronym EEBO-TCP. It was this EEBO-TCP data that enable us to discover the early modern uses of “bastard” which we mentioned in the previous video.
If you have any questions about EEBO-TCP, put them in the comments, otherwise move onto the next step, where we elaborate on a corpus constructed from EEBO-TCP texts which is designed specifically to help with the analysis of Shakespeare’s language.
Shakespeare's Language: Revealing Meanings and Exploring Myths
Shakespeare's Language: Revealing Meanings and Exploring Myths
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