Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
}
TY - CHAP
T1 - Slavery and Britain in the 19th century
AU - McEnery, Anthony
AU - Baker, Helen
AU - Brezina, Vaclav
PY - 2021/9/5
Y1 - 2021/9/5
N2 - This study uses a corpus of just under two billion words from one nineteenth-century British newspapers, 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, 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 and 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.
AB - This study uses a corpus of just under two billion words from one nineteenth-century British newspapers, 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, 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 and 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.
KW - corpus analysis
KW - historical discourse analysis
KW - slavery
KW - Liverpool
KW - news discourse
U2 - 10.1075/scl.101.02mce
DO - 10.1075/scl.101.02mce
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SN - 9789027209689
T3 - Studies in Corpus Linguistics
SP - 9
EP - 38
BT - Time in Languages, Languages in Time
A2 - Čermáková , Anna
A2 - Egan, Thomas
A2 - Hasselgård, Hilde
A2 - Rørvik, Sylvi
PB - John Benjamins
CY - Amsterdam
ER -