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In:Challenges in Corpus Linguistics: Rethinking corpus compilation and analysis
Edited by Mark Kaunisto and Marco Schilk
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 118] 2024
► pp. 9–34

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Engaging with bad (meta)data in historical corpus linguistics

 | University of Helsinki
 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 19 September 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.118.02var
Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss some common pitfalls related to historical data and its use in linguistic analysis. We argue that the “philologist’s dilemma”, as originally proposed by Rissanen (1989), should be reconceptualized to meet the needs of the fast-evolving field of corpus linguistics, where scholars make increasing use of big-data resources and sophisticated statistical modelling. By providing examples of errors and uncertainties related to, for example, corpus metadata, sampling, balance, and OCR accuracy, we argue that corpus linguists should pay increasingly close attention to the sampling and annotation principles employed in the compilation of historical corpora as well as to the quality of the linguistic data. We propose that the principle of “knowing one’s corpus” in terms of its compilation principles has become all the more important in the age of big-data corpora, where it is not feasible for individual researchers, or corpus compilers, to validate their data manually.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.POS annotation in diachronic datasets
    • 2.1Accounting for category change
    • 2.2Theoretical choices in the design of the annotation scheme
    • 2.3Annotation tailored to specific research questions
  • 3.Large corpora
    • 3.1Inaccuracies in text sampling
    • 3.2Changes in the balance of subgenres
  • 4.Historical databases
    • 4.1Issues with balance and metadata
    • 4.2OCR errors
      • 4.2.1Hapax legomena
      • 4.2.2Historical lexis
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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