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From Original Sources to Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of Multilingualism in Medieval English

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Medieval English in a Multilingual Context

Part of the book series: New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics ((NAEHL))

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Abstract

This chapter presents an outline of some of the different types of digital datasets and tools that are currently available to help researchers in the analysis of multilingualism and its effects on the development of medieval English. A complete survey of all existing material is infeasible and will rapidly become outdated, and so the goal is instead to discuss representative examples, in order to illustrate what is currently possible with the broad range of methodologies and tools that is at our disposal. Rather than presenting a simple list, the discussion instead focuses on different stages of typical workflows and seeks to provide a realistic assessment of the potential and limits, as well as suggestions of where we might usefully go in future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some relevant examples include the Cambridge Digital Library (Search > Advanced Search), the Digital Bodleian (Advanced Search) and the joint Bibliothèque Nationale de France–British Library project France Angleterre 700–1200 (Recherche avancée). This is also possible for Parker on the Web, but it is not easy to find: one way is to click on ‘Search’ while leaving the search box empty, then one may or may not see options to ‘Limit your search’ depending on the size of your browser window. If not, one can click not on the text ‘Limit your search’ but instead on the box on the far right at the same horizontal level, and then the options appear. For full details of websites and software cited in this chapter, see ‘Digital resources and websites’ in the bibliography below.

  2. 2.

    The Biblissima project has recently received a second major grant and so has started its next phase as Biblissima+.

  3. 3.

    See Footnote 1, as well as Gallica (Recherche avancée), and the James Catalogue of Western Manuscripts from the Wrenn Library in Cambridge (Browse Catalogue), among many others.

  4. 4.

    Archetype is the software used for the DigiPal project cited above, as well as others including Exon Domesday, Models of Authority, and VisigothicPal, among others.

  5. 5.

    Two examples are Exon Domesday (see Labs > Codicological Visualisation and Labs > Collation Visualisations) and BiblioPhilly, where some digitised manuscripts come with interactive quire diagrams.

  6. 6.

    The distinction between OCR and HTR is not clearly defined: it can refer to the source material (OCR for print and HTR for manuscript), or the underlying process (recognition character-by-character or recognition line-by-line), but in modern systems there is little practical distinction. For this reason, we refer to OCR / HTR throughout.

  7. 7.

    Kraken is an OCR / HTR software which runs from the command line, and eScriptorium is a web-based graphical user interface that interacts with kraken. The two are therefore often used together and so will be referred to collectively as a single package unless only one of the two parts is intended.

  8. 8.

    These corpora do not reflect multilingualism primarily for technical reasons, for instance because paragraphs written in Latin that are part of the original texts were not included. However, traces are left in the form of foreign language sequences that are tagged FW (foreign word).

  9. 9.

    This project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG, research grant TRI555/6-1, TRI555/6-2 Sachbeihilfe. For further information, see https://tinyurl.com/dfgbasics/ [accessed 29 September 2021].

  10. 10.

    Although the verb-lemmatised version of the PPCME2 cannot be provided for licensing reasons, the lemmatiser script is available for download on the BASICS website so that everyone who owns a copy of the corpus can perform the lemmatisation himself / herself.

  11. 11.

    The video tutorial on the BASICS Toolkit website provides an introduction to all resources and tools.

  12. 12.

    Since copying stresses the non-identicality of copied material, Percillier opts for Johanson’s (2002) term for borrowing.

  13. 13.

    For a study of the copying of -able in Middle English, see Trips and Stein (2008).

  14. 14.

    This distinction is also called ‘reflexive’ and ‘inherent reflexive’ (cf. Steinbach 2002; see also Trips 2020).

  15. 15.

    The query for argument reflexives using the ‘simple strategy’ is limited to subject pronouns. For details about the limitations of querying these patterns, see Percillier and Trips (2020).

  16. 16.

    The Programming Historian > ‘Lessons’. At the time of writing, the categories have thirty-three, twenty, twenty-one, twelve and two lessons respectively in English; other languages have different numbers of lessons but follow the same broad pattern.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Carola Trips

  2. École Pratique des Hautes Études—Université PSL, Paris, France

    Peter A. Stokes

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  1. Carola Trips
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  1. English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Sara M. Pons-Sanz

  2. School of Humanities, University of Westminster, London, UK

    Louise Sylvester

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Trips, C., Stokes, P.A. (2023). From Original Sources to Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of Multilingualism in Medieval English. In: Pons-Sanz, S.M., Sylvester, L. (eds) Medieval English in a Multilingual Context. New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30947-2_3

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