Seminar Reminder: Tuesday 21 February - Magnus Huber, 'The Old Bailey Corpus: Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries'
Seth
Institute of Historical Research Seminar in Digital History
Time: Tuesday, 21 February, 5.15 pm GMT
Venue: ST276 (Stewart House, second floor) and streamed live on the web at historyspot.org.uk
Magnus Huber (Giessen), 'The Old Bailey Corpus: Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries'
This is a reminder that on Tuesday Magnus Huber will be talking about the use of historical court records in the investigation of language change. The full abstract is below.
Look forward to seeing you there.
Abstract:
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, were
published between 1674 and 1913 and constitute a large body of texts from the
beginning of Present Day English (almost 200,000 trials, ca. 134 million words).
The Proceedings were digitalized by
the social historians Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield) and Tim
Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and are searchable at the excellent Old Bailey Proceedings Online
(http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/), which also provides detailed background
information on the Old Bailey and the publication history of the Proceedings.
This talk reports on a project that turned the Proceedings into the linguistic Old Bailey Corpus (OBC). Corpus linguistics relies on the statistical analysis of large collections of electronic texts to investigate language variation and/or language change. In the absence of recorded speech samples before the invention of the phonograph, language historians have turned to written text types that are close to spoken language. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey are particularly suitable for the study of spoken English as they were taken down by shorthand scribes, and their verbatim passages are arguably as near as we can get to the spoken word of the 18th and 19th centuries. The OBC identifies about 114 million words as direct speech from the 1720s onwards, of which 22 million words have received detailed mark-up for sociolinguistic (sex, profession, age, residence of speaker, role in the court-room) and textual variables (the shorthand scribe and publisher of individual Proceedings).
After an overview of the creation of OBC 1.0, to be released early in 2012, I will illustrate the potential of this corpus for fine-grained sociohistorical-linguistic studies. One aim is to point out the added forms of analysis that this linguistic corpus and corpus-linguistic methods make possible as compared to the historical resource described above. Examples will be drawn from the development of, for example, negative contraction (e.g. do not > don’t) and the development of relative clauses over the two centuries covered by the OBC.
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The IHR Seminar in digital history is actively engaged in presenting and discussing new methodologies which have been made possible through the development of computational methods for the study of history. Further information can be found on the IHR Seminar page at http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/321. Follow us on twitter @IHRDigHist or join the mailing list for seminar announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/ihr-digital-history-seminar-announce