Chapter published in:
Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English
Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 96] 2020
► pp. 29–56

Changes in society and language

Charting poverty

| University of Zurich
This study addresses how societal and linguistic changes can be detected using historical corpora, with the topics of poverty and industrial revolution as a case study, based on large historical corpora, in particular EEBO, and CLMET3.0. The results, based on a rich array of state-of-the art statistical approaches (such as kernel density estimation), show how poverty, industrial revolution, and urbanization are associated through, for instance, the associations of war, religion, family, poverty, and suffering. The study also discusses the importance of data size and cleanness, the temptations of distant reading, and the necessity for validating the discovered patterns in close reading and distant reading in interaction.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and pre-processing
    • 2.1The EEBO Collection as sampler corpus
    • 2.2The CLMET3.0 corpus
    • 2.3The pre-processing step of spelling normalization
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Data-based and data-driven approaches
    • 3.2Document classification
    • 3.3Topic modelling
    • 3.4Conceptual maps
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Dictionary-based approach
    • 4.2Topic modelling
      • 4.2.1EEBO early vs. EEBO late
      • 4.2.2Adding CLMET3.0 and increasing the number of topics
    • 4.3Conceptual maps
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 08 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.96.02sch
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Corpora and software

CLMET3.0 = Corpus of Late Modern English Texts
version 3.0. De Smet, Hendrik, Diller, Hans-Jürgen & Tyrkkö, Jukka (comps). https://​perswww​.kuleuven​.be​/~u0044428/
EEBO = Early English Books Online. Davies, Mark
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Mallet = Machine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit
http://​mallet​.cs​.umass​.edu​/topics​.php
VARD2 = Baron, Alistair and Rayson, Paul
2008 VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, UK 22 May 2008.Google Scholar

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