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Open Corpora for Digital History Assignment

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Asked 9 months ago by mattprice
Latest answer from SharonHoward
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mattprice
Member
Hi,
I'm putting together assignments for next semester's digital history class, and want to construct a simple distant reading for my students, probably using Voyant Tools (unless there is a very easy-to-use pure HTML/Javascript set of tools that will let my students use some of the basic JS skills they'll have acquired in their previous assignment).

I would like to present them with existing corpora of historical texts: preferably not literature, but newspapers/government documents, letters etc. Most archives I've found use PDF images with mediocre to poor OCR. Can anyone point me to a good collection of historical corpora that students can experiment with?

Thank you!
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Posted 9 months ago Permalink
Shawn
Member

Hi - check out Melodee Beal's 'scissors and paste' http://www.scissorsandpaste.net/ source https://github.com/mhbeals/scissorsandpaste/tree/master/Outputs

Also MSU libraries: https://www.lib.msu.edu/dh/humdata/

and this from Sharon Howard - http://sharonhoward.github.io/cdt/

Posted 9 months ago Permalink
Miriam Posner
Member

Oh, check this out, from Alan Liu.

Posted 9 months ago Permalink
SharonHoward
Member
Best Answer

Lists of corpora compiled by historical linguists (some may be restricted access): http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/corpora/index.html

Oxford Texts Archive is full of amazing things (including EEBO-TCP texts), though students might have to register for access: http://ota.ox.ac.uk/

This huge list of museums/libraries etc data compiled by Mia Ridge emphasises APIs and linked open data but it's actually very wide-ranging: http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/21933420/Museum%C2%A0APIs

The British Library is also making a varied assortment of datasets and text collections available through its BL Labs project: http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

Corpora from Mark Davies, BYU (including Hansard): http://corpus.byu.edu/

Some smaller collections that I like:

Thomas Bodley Correspondence (XML) from the Centre for Lives and Letters: https://github.com/livesandletters/bodley1

Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918, 1870-1973 (transcripts of c. 450 oral history interviews + structured metadata): https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=2000&type=Data%20catalogue

Repository of Early American Datasets: http://repository.upenn.edu/mead/

A new version of the Old Bailey Online Corpus is due to be released shortly and will be open data (the current version requires registration): http://www1.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus/

Posted 9 months ago Permalink

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