Digitising medieval texts for linguistic research


The aim of this project is to build a corpus of late medieval English prose texts (c. 1350-1550). The corpus can then be used to study many interesting linguistic developments of that time in greater detail than hitherto possible, such as the emergence of modern adverbs (like also, always, or already), the grammaticalization of any (I haven’t got any plans, but not *I have got any plans), or the rise of wh-relative pronouns (he who writes, for earlier he that writes).

The student will create digitisations of modern editions of medieval texts. This involves scanning the actual editions to create an electronic file, then running optical character recognition (OCR) software on the electronic text, and most importantly reading and correcting the text to eliminate errors. Furthermore, the student will add some basic annotations about editorial information (such as page numbers, footnotes) in a format called XML. The result will be a high-quality digital transcription of the text that will be valued by linguists around the world.

This project requires great attention to detail.

The student should have a passion for working with texts (layout, copying), rather than working on texts (interpretation, literary value).

It would be useful to have an interest in medieval history and literature.

The student should have his or her own laptop to work with.

Familiarity with XML is a plus, but not required.

The internship may be particularly suitable for (corpus) linguists, students of digital humanities or medievalists.