Exploring Early Modern English Medical Texts

Corpus Pragmatics

“…The corpus was compiled as part of a long-running research project investigating changes in scientific thought-styles, hosted at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. The pragmatic nature of the research interest affected the corpus composition in a number of ways: the corpus includes long, 10,000 word extracts of texts rather than short samples; it comes with its own software, which provides access to passages in the context of the entire extract; it includes extensive metainformation on each text and author; and it provides direct links to additional context information, such as hyperlinks to scanned manuscript pages on Early English Books Online (EEBO) (see Tyrkkö, Hickey & Marttila 2010). All of this makes the corpus very well-suited for studies of pragmatic variables, while it can nevertheless be fruitfully used to investigate purely grammatical or lexicological research questions (e.g.…”

Early Modern Medicine in Manuscript and Print

“…Each corpus file was proofread twice by other project members, and checked against an original copy held by a scholarly library, in most cases the British Library or Wellcome Library. The transcriptions retained the original spellings and lineations, but some items were standardised as part of the editing process (for details, see Tyrkkö et al, 2010). These editorial interventions included converting the long <ſ> into standard <s>, etc.…”