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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. 68–88

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Early newspapers as data for corpus linguistics (and Digital Humanities)

Issues in using the British Library Newspapers database as a corpus

 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 19 September 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.118.05hil
Abstract
The availability of large digital archives has great potential for corpus linguistic research, but their use is not without problems. These problems can often be traced to fundamentally different ideas of what might constitute “good data” in Digital Humanities and in corpus linguistics, leading to different expectations regarding how the data is made available to researchers. This chapter discusses the specific challenges involved in using the British Library Newspapers database for corpus linguistics and considers potential solutions for them. It is argued that, to take full advantage of the database, it is necessary to adopt a flexible approach enabling a critical reflection on the digital materials, how they have been collected, processed, and made available.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Digital text analysis in the humanities
    • 2.1Digital Humanities
    • 2.2Corpus linguistics
    • 2.3Towards a useful synergy
  • 3.Historical newspaper prose and the British Library Newspapers database
    • 3.1Problems with available search tools
    • 3.2Sampling, balance, and representativeness
    • 3.3Registers and subregisters
    • 3.4Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • 4.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
References (45)
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