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Time in Languages, Languages in Time
Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 101] 2021
► pp. 9–38

Slavery and Britain in the 19th century

| Lancaster University
| Lancaster University
| Lancaster University
This study uses a corpus of just under two billion words from one historic British newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, to explore shifting attitudes to slavery in Britain in the nineteenth century in the context of a port city that benefitted from the trade. In doing so, we explore three methodological issues – how to explore concepts in large corpora, how to do this over time and how to deal with poor quality data. Our approach to the study of concepts through time uses a new approach to looking at word usage change over time, Usage Fluctuation Analysis (McEnery, Brezina & Baker 2019). Our exploration of the issue of poor quality data is motivated by the variable quality of the OCR texts which constitute our nineteenth-century newspaper corpus data. Problems in data quality bedevil work on large-scale text collections of historic material. In this paper we will show that collocation, the core technique of UFA, can be used on such data if appropriate settings are chosen that minimise the problems arising from poor quality electronic text, permitting the exploration of corpus data at scale.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and data quality
  • 3.Scale
  • 4.Liverpool and the slave trade
  • 5.The Liverpool Mercury
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1The cessation of the slave trade
    • 6.2Discussion and location
    • 6.3Persistence of the slave trade
    • 6.4Condemnation, opposition and support of the slave trade
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.101.02mce
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