SimpleText

What is scalable scholarship? Simply put, scalable scholarship entails the study of objects across varying levels of scale. It encourages scholars to think of what a corpus may look like when writ large. Rather than just examining the relationships between an author’s texts, what happens when we broaden the purview of inquiry to how an author’s text relates to the print output from the year of its publication? More generally, what would it look like to investigate connections within a corpus of 100, 1,000, or even 10,000 texts? Read more…

A key tenet of the Visualizing English Print project is that by considering larger collections of documents, we are able to observe larger amounts of variation, which can allow us to observe phenomena of interest to scholars. Unfortunately, variation also brings with it challenges. Much of this stems from the fact that as corpora grow in size and complexity, more kinds of variation emerge (as well as more of each kinds of variation). Read more…

Summary: This page allows users to familiarize themselves with the VEP SimpleText format and determine whether or not VEP text corpora meet their needs. This document introduces the VEP SimpleText format. It outlines the format’s rationale and goals, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of our text corpora. Moreover, it details how our texts can be used while linking to other sources for those interested in Early Modern English text corpora.

Outline

• Introduction to SimpleText
• SimpleText Rationale
• SimpleText Goals
• Formatting Decisions
• SimpleText Example
• SimpleText Uses
• Other Resources

Read more…