Tag Archives: Iona

A distant look at EEBO-TCP’s “Controversial Literature”

Iona writes: To explore the contents of EEBO-TCP in a distant fashion (and give context to Linguistic DNA data), I have continued to experiment with the Text Creation Partnership’s metadata. Some of this work has been documented in conference papers presented at SHARP and DRHA. Having spent time examining the metadata for items (said to have been) printed in the 1550s and in the years 1610 and 1611 (to be documented in a subsequent blog post), I have now moved on to experiment with how categories observed in those slices manifest across the broader dataset.

One prominent category provided by the TCP Terms listings (a part of the TCP metadata that derives from the same source as much of the ESTC, and is in debt to prior cataloguing efforts) is “Controversial Literature”. About 5.5% of EEBO items in the GitHub TCP catalogue carry this label. Using time as a primary dimension (being the simplest metadata entity to map), it is possible to see how the distribution of “Controversial Literature” in the 1550s compares with other decades.

The following chart plots the raw quantity of EEBO-TCP items labelled “Controversial Literature” in each decade:

“Controversial Literature”: raw number of items in TCP by decade

For the first half-century of EEBO-TCP (1470-1519), no items carry the label. This is not entirely surprising: The quantity of surviving print items transcribed for this early period is much slighter. The next chart plots the raw quantity of all items in EEBO-TCP by decade as an aid to comparison:

Chart showing gradual growth, then increase on a different scale.

All EEBO-TCP: items plotted by decade of printing.

The sparsity of the early period is visible. The drop in the final column (representing the decade beginning 1700) in both charts is a by-product of decade apportionment given the criteria that define EEBO: 817 items carry the date 1700, very few post-date that. Looking at the second chart, the quantity of items printed grows steadily until the 1630s (a slight dip). From the 1640s, the trend breaks down as overall quantities increase significantly: more than 76% of EEBO-TCP items post-date 1640.

It is possible to gain some insight by comparing these two charts. For example, a dip in the 1630s is common to both TCP-whole and Controversial-part. We are not limited to the raw perspective: The Controversial values can be normalised by the total number of EEBO-TCP items from the given decade (dividing raw counts), to show how the share of Controversial literature (v. Items not-labelled-Controversial Literature) varies by decade.

Each bar represents 100% of EEBO-TCP items for the given decade

This mode of representation may make Controversial Literature seem like a marginal category when compared with the mass of other items. Yet in four decades (1540s, 1550s, 1580s and 1600s) this category makes at least 10 per cent or more of the total. If we retain the normalisation but view the information (i.e. percentage of EEBO-TCP items labelled as Controversial Literature by decade) in the plain chart format, the earlier perception of growth is effectively challenged:

Despite overall variation, the trend is downward.

On the wane: “Controversial Literature” as percentage of EEBO-TCP by decade.

From the high point of the 1540s, the market share of “Controversial Literature” appears to decline (if we allow ourselves to conceive of TCP as a market).

Of course, decades are an imposition. This is made evident when we consider the two-year period 1610 to 1611. The following chart counts EEBO-TCP items across 2-year periods, with a trendline tracking the moving average across 5 such periods (i.e. spanning a ten-year period).

“Controversial Literature”: Raw counts of items in two-year periods, with decade moving average.

The overall pattern remains one of exponential growth (a fitted curve reaches R-squared value of .916). For the two-year period beginning 1610, the item count is visibly below the relevant average, and slightly shy of the growth curve.

Here’s a snapshot from the relevant data:

Data table showing 274 items for 1610-11.

Total quantity of EEBO-TCP items for specified 2-year period(s).

The next chart plots “Controversial Literature” data in the same way, albeit omitting the periods from 1522 to 1527 (because their zero values prevent exponential curve plotting). Here, the period 1610-1611 stands proud of the growth curve, matching closely the moving average. Considered in terms of the (raw) quantity of “Controversial Literature”, this period has more in common with the 4 preceding ones (1602-1609) than those that follow.

“Controversial Literature” items by 2-year period, with decade moving average and trendline.

This is the equivalent snapshot from the raw data:

Total quantity of “Controversial Literature” items for specified 2-year period(s).

Finally, beginning in 1528-9 (when “Controversial Literature” becomes continuous) and ending in 1698-9 (to avoid a misleading dip caused by the relative absence of items in 1701), here is the distribution of Controversial literature as a component of TCP across the two-year periods.

“Controversial Literature” as a component of EEBO-TCP, 1528-1699: Each bar represents 100% of the EEBO-TCP items for the specified 2-year period.

In this view, we can see firstly that the peak occurs in 1548-9, but also that (due to the combination of a peak in items so-labelled and a relative dearth of items) in 1610-1611 so-termed “Controversial Literature” has an atypically high stake. Its 15.3% is the second highest point across the 172-year span.

The final table offers a snapshot from the data for comparison:

How raw values convert to percentages: “Controversial Literature” and other EEBO-TCP items for specified 2-year period(s).

And if all this leaves you wondering what constitutes “Controversial Literature” (and why it matters for us), that question will form the core of my next LDNA blogpost.

On “Lost Books” (ed. Bruni & Pettegree)

Review: Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe. Ed. Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree. Library of the Written Word 46 / The Handpress World 34. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016. 523 pages.

We solicited this book for review because we have been keenly aware that we cannot take what has been transcribed and preserved through the digitisation processes of Early English Books Online and the Text Creation Partnership as an accurate indication of all the material that was printed in the early modern period. Setting aside the idiosyncrasies of selectivity in the composition of EEBO-TCP, which have been documented elsewhere, there is a prior ‘selectivity’ about what survived to be catalogued.

The volume collects together the proceedings of the Lost Books conference held at the University of St Andrews in June 2014, and divisions within the volume loosely reflect those of the original call.

Pettegree’s introduction, “The Legion of the Lost” is a full-length essay discussing not only how books become lost but how one can know about what has been lost. It is accessible and engaging and would be a worthy reading assignment for undergraduates or masters students studying book history. As observed in a prior blogpost, “While the chapter … performs the function of uniting what follows, and does at times point to specific contents in the coming chapters, there is nothing of the clunkiness that one sometimes observes in the introduction of an edited collection.”

The two essays that follow both approach the challenge of assessing the loss of incunabula, i.e. print materials from pre-1500. Falk Eisermann begins with a comparison of the listings in the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke with the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. He probes possible methods for distinguishing items that were printed (and lost) from items never-printed, giving examples from archival sources that defy expectation: “lost editions by unknown printers (sometimes located in incunabulistic ghost towns), containing texts not preserved anywhere else, even representing works of hitherto unrecorded authors” (43). The book historians’ task, one may imagine, is an uphill struggle; optimistically, there is fresh work to be done as no one has yet analysed the customary discussion of other printed works in paratext “with regard to dark matter” (50). Jonathan Green and Frank McIntyre (Chapter 3) aim to quantify the losses, offering an open discussion of the pitfalls of particular statistical approaches to this question. They recommend modelling the counts of surviving copies as a negative binomial distribution, accommodating correlation in loss and survival. For—and this is significant to LDNA—“books are not preserved or destroyed independently of each other” (59). Small items are more likely to survive if bound together; volumes in a library often share a common destiny. In addition, taste is a cultural construct with ideas of fashion and significance affecting more than one owner’s decision to dispose of or conserve. Taking into account variations of format, Green and McIntyre suggest that as much as 30 per cent of Quarto editions may have been lost entirely, comparing with 60 per cent of Broadsides and 15 per cent of Folios.

Part 2 is composed of national case-studies covering vocal scores from Renaissance Spain (Chapter 4, showing a markedly persistent repertoire conserved by copying when required); evidence of book ownership and circulation in pre-Reformation Scandinavia (Chapter 5, conducted with the help of inventories); the meticulous reconstruction of a lost Polish original on the basis of later editions (Chapter 6, touching also on the circulation of fortune-telling books throughout early modern Europe); a study of the Stationers’ Company Register (Chapter 7); a sheet-count- based model for calculating loss of seventeenth-century materials based on records for the Southern Netherlands—using the metadata-rich STCV, which also positions title-page engraving and roman typeface as features positively correlated with survival (Chapter 8); the identification of patterns of loss using book advertisements from the Dutch Republic (Chapter 9—exposing partly the proliferation of multiple localised editions); and a report weaving together a census of seventeenth-century Sicilian printing activity with a legal dispute over the library of Francesco Branciforti, attesting strong local attachment to this private collection (Chapter 10).

In Part 3, Christine Bénévent and Malcolm Walsby revisit the publication history of Guillaume Budé’s apophthegms (Chapter 11), combining careful study of the layout to demonstrate Gazeau’s compositor pretended to a new edition by replacing the first quire, with a call not to dismiss the “intellectual value” of later editions, noting the Paris copy of De L’Institution du Prince had the highest survival rate and was owned “by the most influential and powerful in early modern Europe” (including Edward VI, 252). Michele Camaioni aims to reconstruct a censored (but popular) mystical text using its censorship record (Chapter 12). Three further chapters draw on data from the RICI project, a study of Italian religious orders’ book ownership based on a Vatican-led census: Rosa Marisa Borraccini documents Girolamo de Palermo’s “unknown best-seller”, a devotional work running to “plausibly . . . more than one hundred” editions (Chapter 13); Roberto Rusconi probes weaknesses in the cataloguing, involving misspelt transcriptions, inadequate shorthand (opera omnia, etc.) and perhaps the deliberate disguising of works by disapproved authors (Chapter 14); and Giovanni Granata attempts to merge statistical extrapolation of lost works with study of specific lost editions based on the bibliographic records produced by the census (Chapter 15).

Part 4 is dedicated to lost libraries. Anna Giulia Cavagna observes the motives of Alfonso del Carretto, an exiled monarch whose self-catalogued collection prioritised texts pertaining (mostly through paratext such as dedications) to people whose powerful patronage he wished to secure, revealing books as “vectors of social relations” (357, Chapter 16). Martine Julia van Ittersum pursues the preservation and loss of Hugo Grotius’ personal collections, observing that preservation required “neglect, though not too much of it” (384) and that the preservation of printed materials was correlated with loss of manuscript (Chapter 17). Federico Cesi, the target of Maria Teresa Biagetti’s study (Chapter 18), was the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome; his now dispersed collection included works of botany, zoology, alchemy, and medical texts, its components known through correspondence and post mortem inventory. Sir Hans Sloane’s collections, including printed books “estimated at about 45,000 volumes”, formed the kernel of what is now the British Library; Alison Walker explains the difficulties of tracing Sloane’s books, which when duplicated by other collections were often dispersed through sale or gifting, or migrated at the creation of new specialist institutions such as the National History Museum. By reconstructing the collection, Walker argues, one may attain a “reflection . . . of the intellectual environment of the day” and of “Sloane himself as a scientist and physician” (412, Chapter 19). The last chapter in Part 4 outlines the hopes of the AHRC research network ‘Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World’, using a case study from Wigtown (NW Scotland) to show how archival resources about the creation and use of libraries yield insight into sociability (Chapter 20); we find widows borrowing while patrons gain more from the bureaucracy and facilitation than the library’s holdings.

The last section (Part 5), entitled “War and Peace”, considers the woes that have befallen historic collections in more recent times. Jan Alessandrini discusses Hamburg’s collections, protection measures during the Second World, the seizure of private Jewish libraries, and the political challenges of reconstruction (with some prospect of help from Russian digitisation, Chapter 21). Tomasz Nastulczyk acknowledges that “Swedish pillaging paradoxically helped to preserve” books from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that might otherwise have been lost (462, Chapter 22). Co-editor Flavia Bruni writes of the successful preservation of Italian archives and libraries aided by “a clear and centralised policy” in WW2, arguing that “international agreements” are also essential if cultural heritage is to be preserved (484, Chapter 23). The closing chapter is devoted to broadsheet ordinances, lost—or perhaps missing—as a result of the collapse of Cologne city archives in 2009; happily, microfilm means all is not lost, and Saskia Limbach also successfully traces invoices and other evidence of print activity through a range of archival sources (Chapter 24).

It will be evident from this account that the case studies are drawn from across Europe, with three chapters directly addressing British material. Of these, Alexandra Hill’s intersects most closely with the period Linguistic DNA has focused on so far, with the Register containing “with some exceptions [e.g. government publications and school books], . . . all the books authorised to be printed during the Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Caroline periods” (144–5). Comparing this information with the English Short Title Catalogue, Hill shows that for the 1590s, the survival rate of fiction and ballads is significantly lower than other genres of publication; in addition, within a relatively well-preserved domain such as religious literature, subcategories may fare disproportionately badly as is the case for prayer books, destroyed—Hill hypothesises—by continual use. These kinds of absences need to be borne in mind as we proceed to analyse the survivors. Of course, given the cultural traffic of early modern Europe, much of what is learned from non-British collections is also relevant for thinking critically about how texts survived, how others were lost, and how Linguistic DNA should correspondingly limit the claims built on the print discourse of EEBO-TCP.

As of summer 2018, Lost Books is now open access, and freely available online for all to read.

LDNA at Digital Humanities Congress 2016, Sheffield

LDNA organised two panels at the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress (DHC; Sheffield, 8th-10th September. Both focused on text analytics, with the first adopting the theme ‘Between numbers and words’, and the second ‘Identifying complex meanings in historical texts’. Fraser reports:

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What does EEBO represent? Part I: sixteenth-century English

Ahead of the 2016 Sixteenth Century Conference, Linguistic DNA Research Associate Iona Hine reflected on the limits of what probing EEBO can teach us about sixteenth century English. This is the first of two posts addressing the common theme “What does EEBO represent?”

The 55 000 transcriptions that form EEBO-TCP are central to LDNA’s endeavour to study concepts and semantic change in early modern English. But do they really represent the “universe of English printed discourse”?

The easy answer is “no”. For several reasons:

As is well documented elsewhere, EEBO is not restricted to English-language texts (cf. e.g. Gadd). Significant bodies of Latin and French documents printed in Britain have been transcribed, and one can browse through a list of other languages identified using ProQuest’s advanced search functionality. To this extent, EEBO represents more than the “universe of English printed discourse”.

But it also represents a limited “universe”. EEBO can only represent what survived to be catalogued. Its full image records represent individual copies. And its transcriptions represent a further subset of the survivals. As the RA currently occupied with reviewing Lost Books (eds. Bruni & Pettegree),* I have a keen awareness of the complex patterns of survival and loss. A prestigious reference work, the must-buy for ambitious libraries, might have a limited print run and yet was almost guaranteed survival–however much it was actively consulted. A popular textbook, priced for individual ownership, would have much higher rates of attrition: dog-eared, out-of-date, disposable. Survival favours genres, and there will be gaps in the English EEBO can represent.

The best function of the “universe” tagline is its emphasis on print. We have limited access to the oral cultures of the past, though as Cathy Shrank’s current project and the Corpus of English Dialogues demonstrate, there are constructions of orality within EEBO. Equally, where correspondence was set in print, correspondence forms a part of EEBO-TCP. There is diversity within EEBO, but it is an artefact that relies on the prior act of printing (and bibliography, microfilm, digitisation, transcription, to be sure). It will never represent what was not printed (and this will mean particular underprivileged Englishes are minimally visible).

There is another dimension of representativeness that matters for LDNA. Drawing on techniques from corpus linguistics makes us aware that in the past corpora, collections of texts produced in order to control the analysis of language-in-use, were compiled with considerable attention to the sampling and weighting of different text types. Those using them could be confident about what was in there (journalism? speech? novels?). Do we need that kind of familiarity to work confidently with EEBO-TCP? The question is great enough to warrant a separate post!

The points raised so far have focused on the whole of EEBO. There is an additional challenge when we consider how well EEBO can represent the sixteenth century. Of the ca. 55 000 texts in EEBO-TCP, only 4826 (less than 10 per cent) represent works printed between 1500 and 1599. If we operate with a broader definition, the ‘long sixteenth century’ and impose the limits of the Short Title Catalogue, the period 1470-1640 constitutes less than 25 per cent of EEBO-TCP (12 537 works). And some of those will be in Latin and French!

Of course, some sixteenth century items may be long texts–and the bulging document count of the 1640s is down to the transcription of several thousand short pamphlets and tracts–so that the true weighting of long-sixteenth-century-TCP may be more than the document figures indicate. Yet the statistics are sufficient to suggest we proceed with caution. While one could legitimately posit that the universe of English discourse was itself smaller in the sixteenth century–given the presence of Latin as scholarly lingua franca–it is equally the case that the evidence has had longer to go missing.

As a first post on the theme, this only touches the surface of the discussion about representativeness and limits. Other observations jostle for attention. (For example, diachronic analysis of EEBO material is often dependent on metadata that privileges the printing date, though that may be quite different from the date of composition. A sample investigation of translate‘s associations immediately uncovered a fourteenth-century bible preface printed in the 1550s, exposed by the recurrence of Middle English forms “shulen” and “hadden”.) Articulating and exploring what EEBO represents is a task of some complexity. Thank goodness we’ve another 20 months to achieve it!

* Read the full Linguistic DNA review here. The e-edition of Bruni & Pettegree’s volume became open access in 2018.

From Spring to Summer: LDNA on the road

June 2016:
For the past couple of months, our rolling horizon has looked increasingly full of activity. This new blogpost provides a brief update on where we’ve been and where we’re going. We’ll be aiming to give more thorough reports on some of these activities after the events.

Where we’ve been

In May, Susan, Iona and Mike travelled to Utrecht, at the invitation of Joris van Eijnatten and Jaap Verheul. Together with colleagues from Sheffield’s History Department, we presented the different strands of Digital Humanities work ongoing at Sheffield. We learned much from our exchanges with Utrecht’s AsymEnc and Translantis research programs, and enjoyed shared intellectual probing of visualisations of change across time. We look forward to continued engagement with each others’ work.

A week later, Seth and Justyna participated in This&THATCamp at the University of Sussex (pictured), with LDNA emerging second in a popular poll of topics for discussion at this un-conference-style event. Productive conversations across the two days covered data visualisation, data manipulation, text analytics, digital humanities and even data sonification. We hope to hear more from Julie Weeds and others when the LDNA team return to Brighton in September.

Next week, we’ll be calling on colleagues at the HRI to talk us through their experience visualising complex humanities data. Richard Ward (Digital Panopticon) and Dirk Rohman (Migration of Faith) have agreed to walk us through their decision-making processes, and talk through the role of different visualisations in exploring, analysing, and explaining current findings.

Where we’re going

The LDNA team are also gearing up for a summer of presentations:

Justyna Robinson will be representing LDNA at Sociolinguistics Symposium (Murcia, 15-18 June), as well as sharing the latest analysis from her longitudinal study of semantic variation focused on polysemous adjectives in South Yorkshire speech. Catch LDNA in the general poster session on Friday (17th), and Justyna’s paper at 3pm on Thursday. #SS21
Susan Fitzmaurice is in Saarland, as first guest speaker at the Historical Corpus Linguistics event hosted by the IDeaL research centre, also on Thursday (16th June) at 2:15pm. Her paper is subtitled “Discursive semantics and the quest for the automatic identification of concepts and conceptual change in English 1500-1800”. #IDeaL
In July, the Glasgow LDNA team are Krakow-bound for DH2016 (11-16 July). The LDNA poster, part of the Semantic Interpretations group, is currently allocated to Booth 58 during the Wednesday evening poster session. Draft programme.
Later in July, Iona heads to SHARP 2016 in Paris (18-22). This year, the bi-lingual Society are focusing on “Languages of the Book”, with Iona’s contribution drawing on her doctoral research (subtitle: European Borrowings in 16th and 17th Century English Translations of “the Book of Books”) and giving attention to the role of other languages in concept formation in early modern English (a special concern for LDNA’s work with EEBO-TCP).
In August, Iona is one of several Sheffield early modernists bound for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Bruges. In addition to a paper in panel 241, “The Vagaries of Translation in the Early Modern World” (Saturday 20th, 10:30am), Iona will also be hosting a unique LDNA poster session at the book exhibit. (Details to follow)
The following week (22-26 August), Seth, Justyna and Susan will be at ICEHL 19 in Essen. Seth and Susan will be talking LDNA semantics from 2pm on Tuesday 23rd.

Back in the UK, on 5 September, LDNA (and the University of Sussex) host our second methodological workshop, focused on data visualisation and linguistic change. Invitations to a select group of speakers have gone out, and we’re looking forward to a hands-on workshop using project data. Members of our network who would like to participate are invited to get in touch.

And back in Sheffield, LDNA is playing a key role in the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress, 8-10 September, hosting two panel sessions dedicated to textual analytics. Our co-speakers include contacts from Varieng and CRASSH. Early bird registration ends 30th June.

Learning with Leuven: Kris Heylen’s visit to the HRI

In 2016, Dr Kris Heylen (KU Leuven) spent a week in Sheffield as a HRI Visiting Fellow, demonstrating techniques for studying change in “lexical concepts” and encouraging the Linguistic DNA team to articulate the distinctive features of the “discursive concept”.

Earlier this month, the Linguistic DNA project hosted Dr Kris Heylen of KU Leuven as a visiting fellow (funded by the HRI Visiting European Fellow scheme). Kris is a member of the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) research group at KU Leuven, which has conducted unique research into the significance of how words cooccur across different ‘windows’ of text (reported by Seth in an earlier blogpost). Within his role, Kris has had a particular focus on the value of visualisation as a means to explore cooccurrence data and it was this expertise from which the Linguistic DNA project wished to learn.

Kris and his colleagues have worked extensively on how concepts are expressed in language, with case studies in both Dutch and English, drawing on data from the 1990s and 2000s. This approach is broadly sympathetic to our work in Linguistic DNA, though we take an interest in a higher level of conceptual manifestation (“discursive concepts”), whereas the Leuven team are interested in so-called “lexical concepts”.

In an open lecture on Tracking Conceptual Change, Kris gave two examples of how the Leuven techniques (under the umbrella of “distributional semantics”) can be applied to show variation in language use, according to context (e.g. types of newspaper) and over time. A first case study explored the notion of a ‘person with an immigration background’ looking at how this was expressed in high and low brow Dutch-language newspapers in the period from 1999 to 2005. The investigation began with the word allochtoon, and identified (through vector analysis) migrant as the nearest synonym in use. Querying the newspaper data across time exposed the seasonality of media discourse about immigration (high in spring and autumn, low during parliamentary breaks or holidays). It was also possible to document a decrease in ‘market share’ of allochtoon compared with migrant, and—using hierarchical cluster analysis—to show how each term was distributed across different areas of discourse (comparing discussion of legal and labour-market issues, for example). A second comparison examined adjectives of ‘positive evaluation’, using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1860-present). Organising each year’s data as a scatter plot in semantic space, the path of an adjective could be traced in relation to others—moving closer to or apart from similar words. The path of terrific from ‘frightening’ to ‘great’ provided a vivid example of change through the 1950s and 1960s.

During his visit, Kris explored some of the first outputs from the Linguistic DNA processor, material printed in the British Isles (or in English) in two years, 1649 and 1699, transcribed for the Text Creation Partnership, and further processed with the MorphAdorner tool developed by Martin Mueller and Philip Burns at NorthWestern. Having run this through additional processes developed at Leuven, Kris led a workshop for Sheffield postgraduate and early career researchers and members of the LDNA team in which we learned different techniques for visualising the distribution of heretics and schismatics in the seventeenth-century.

The lecture audience and workshop participants were drawn from fields including English Literature, History, Computer Science, East Asian Studies, and the School of Languages and Cultures. Prompted partly by the distribution of the Linguistic DNA team (located in Sussex and Glasgow as well as Sheffield), both lecture and workshop were livestreamed over the internet, extending our audiences to Birmingham, Bradford, and Cambridge. We’re exceedingly grateful for the technical support that made this possible.

Time was also set aside to discuss the potential for future collaboration with Kris and others at Leuven, including participation of the QLVL team in LDNA’s next methodological workshop (University of Sussex, September 2016) and other opportunities to build on our complementary fields of expertise.

From Data to Evidence (d2e): conference reflections

Fraser and Iona report (November 2015):

Six members of the Linguistic DNA team were present at the recent d2e conference held by the VARIENG research unit at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The focus of the conference was on tools and methodologies employed in corpus linguistics, whilst the event took for its theme ‘big data, rich data, uncharted data’. The conference offered much food for thought, raising our awareness of the tools and methods employed by other researchers in similar fields. Frequently it was clear that despite the differences between the goals of, for example, sociolinguistics and historical semantics, the knowledge and approach towards data taken by one could be effectively and productively applied to another.

The conference’s plenary speeches were of particular interest. Tony McEnery delineated potential limitations of corpus data and its analysis. His call for researchers to remain aware of the limitations of their data struck a chord with our findings from close examination of EEBO data in its raw and processed forms. One of his main conclusions was the importance of conducting cyclical research—analysing the data with software tools and then returning to the data itself to verify the validity of the findings. LDNA is set up to follow this approach, and Professor McEnery’s presentation reaffirmed its importance. Plenaries by Jane Winters and Päivi Pahta looked further into working with historical data and—in the latter particularly—historical linguistic data, whilst a fascinating presentation by Mark Davies emphasised the importance of corpus size in the type of research which we are undertaking.

LDNA is also taking an active interest in innovative approaches to data analysis and visualisation. Demonstrating software, Gerold Schneider, Eetu Mäkelä, and Jonathan Hope each showcased new tools for representing historical language data and wrangling with metadata. As we progress in our thinking about the kinds of processing which will allow us to identify concepts in our data, we are always on the lookout for ideas and methodological developments which might help us to improve our own findings.

Several research papers connected with the interests of LDNA, especially when they adhered closely to the conference’s theme of exploring large and complex datasets in ways which reveal new patterns in the data. James McCracken’s presentation on adding frequency information to the Oxford English Dictionary was very exciting for the possibilities it could open up to future historical linguistics. (We’ve blogged before about the drawback of not having relevant frequency data when using tools like VARD.) Meanwhile, the techniques used to track change in words’ behaviour, with different dimensions of semantic evolution scrutinised by Hendrik De Smet (for Hansard), Gerold Schneider (in COHA), and Hannah Kermes and Stephania Degaetano-Ortlieb of Saarland University (working with the Royal Scientific Corpus) were not only intrinsically fascinating but provide useful pointers towards the depth and complexity of linguistic features LDNA will need to consider. We will also aim to keep in view Joseph Flanagan’s insistence that linguistic studies should aim for reproducibility, an insistence aided (for those who code with R) by the suite of tools he recommended.

The d2e conference packed a lot into a few days, creating an intense and productive atmosphere in which participants could meet, exchange ideas, and become more aware of the scope of others’ work in related fields. We enjoyed the conversations around our own poster, and much appreciated the hospitality throughout. It was a great opportunity for the LDNA team, providing more invaluable input to our thought and approach to our work.

——-

Abstracts from the conference are available from the d2e pages on the Varieng website.

Anni Aarinen provides a write-up of McEnery’s keynote.

Glasgow-based LDNA member Brian Aitken has written up his d2e experience on the Digital Humanities blog.

Liest thou, or hast a Rewme? Getting the best from VARD and EEBO

This post from August 2015 continues the comparison of VARD and MorphAdorner, tools for tackling spelling variation in early modern English. (See earlier posts here and here.) As of 2018, data on our public interface was prepared with an updated version of MorphAdorner and some additional curation from Martin Mueller at NorthWestern.

This week, we’ve replaced the default VARD set-up with a version designed to optimise the tools for VARD. In essence, this includes a lengthier set of rules to guide the changing of letters, and lists of words and variants that are more suited to the early modern corpus.

It is important to bear in mind that the best use of VARD involves someone ‘training’ it, supervising and to a large extent determining the correct substitutions. But because Linguistic DNA is tackling the whole EEBO-TCP corpus, and the mass of documents within it is far from homogenous, it is difficult to optimise it effectively.

Doth VARD recognise the second-person singular?

A first effort with the EEBO set-up was to review the understanding formed about how VARD works in relation to verb conjugations for the second and third persons singular. A custom text was written to test the output (using the 50% threshold for auto-normalisation as previously):

If he lieth thou liest. When she believeth thou leavest. 
If thou believest not, he leaveth. Where hast thou been? 
When hadst thou gone? Where hath he walked? 
Where goest thou? Where goeth he?
What doth he? What doeth he? What dost thou? 
What doest thou? What ist? What arte doing?

Most of the forms were modernised just as described in the previous post. However, some of the output gave cause for concern. In the first sentence, “liest” became “least”. Further on “goest” became “goosed”, “doest” was accepted as a non-variant, while both “hast” and “dost” were highlighted as unresolved variants. This output can be explained by looking at the variant and word lists and the statistical measures VARD uses.

VARD’s use of variants and word frequencies

Scrutinising the word and variant lists within the EEBO set-up showed that although the variant list recorded “doest” as an instance of “dost”, “doest” and not “dost” appeared in the word list, overriding that variant. Similarly, “ha’st” appears in the variant list as a form of “hast”, but “hast” is not in the word list. It is not difficult to add items to the word list, but the discrepancies in the list contents are surprising. In fact, it might be more appropriate for VARD to record “doest” as a variant of “do”, and “ha’st” of “have”.

For “liest”, the correct variant and word entries are present so that “liest” can be amended to “lie”, giving a known variant [KV] recall score of 100% (indicating this is not a known variant form of any other word). However, the default parameters (regardless of the F-score) favour “least” because that amendment strongly satisfies the other three criteria: letter replacement [LR] (the rules), phonetic matching [PM], and edit distance [ED]. Until human judgment intervenes with the weighting, “least” has the better statistical case. (Much the same applies to “goest” and “goosed”.)

In VARD’s defence, one need only intervene with any of the “-st” verb endings in the text once (before triggering the auto-normalisation process) for the weighting to shift in favour of “liest”. VARD learns well.

Rewme: space, cold, or dominion?

One of the ‘authentic’ EEBO extracts we’ve been testing with is taken from a medical text, A rich store-house or treasury for the diseased, 1596 (TCP A13300). As mentioned in a previous post, employing VARD’s automated normalisation with the default 50% threshold, references to “Rewme” becomes “Room”. Looking again at what is happening beneath the surface, the first surprise is that there is an entry for “rewme” in the variant list, specifying it as a known variant of “room”. This is unsatisfying with regard to EEBO-TCP: a search of the corpus shows that the word form “rewme” appears in 89 texts. Viewing each instance through Anupam Basu’s keyword-in-context interface shows that in 84 texts, “rewme” is used with the meaning “rheum”. Of the other five texts, one is Middle English biblical exegesis (attributed to John Purvey); committed to print as late as 1550, the text repeatedly uses “rewme” with the sense “realm” or “kingdom” (both earthly and divine). The remaining four were printed after 1650 and are either political or historical in intent, similarly using “rewme” as a spelling of “realm”. Nowhere in EEBO-TCP does “rewme” appear with the sense “room”. However, removing it from the known variants (by setting its value to zero) and adding new variant entries for realm and rheum does not result in the desired auto-normalisation: The fact that both realm and rheum are candidates means their KV recall score is halved (50%). At the same time, the preset frequencies strengthen room’s position (309) compared with realm (80) and rheum (50). In fact, the word list accompanying the EEBO set-up seems still to be based on the BNC corpus—featuring robotic (OED 1928) and pulsar (OED 1968) with the same preset frequency as rheum.

So what does this mean for Linguistic DNA?

Again, it is possible to intervene with instances like rewme, whether through the training interface or by manipulating the frequencies. But it is evident that the scale of intervention required is considerable, and it is not obvious that telling VARD that rewme is rheum about 90% of the time that it occurs in EEBO-TCP and realm 10% of the time will have any impact in helping the auto-normalisation process to know when and where to distribute the forms in practice.

The frustrating thing is that the distribution is predictable: in a political text, it is normally “realm”; and in a medical text, it is “rheum”. But VARD seems to have no mechanism to recognise or respond to the contexts of discourse that would so quickly become visible with topic modelling. (Consider the clustering of the four humours in early modern medicine, for example.) I have a feeling this would be where SAMUELS and the Historical Thesaurus come in… if only SAMUELS didn’t rely on VARD’s prior intervention!

_{Wordcloud image created with Wordle.}

Illustrating the tools: first insights on VARD & MorphAdorner

In 2015, we compared two tools developed to address spelling variation in early modern English: VARD and MorphAdorner. This post documents some of that work, outlining how the design and intent of the two tools affects their impact.

The Sheffield RAs are hard at work on our audit of Early English Books Online, figuring out how best to clean up the TCP data for Linguistic DNA’s research goals. In the last post, Seth documented our intention to try out 2 of the tools that have evolved as a method of analysing the data: VARD and MorphAdorner. What we wrote there was based on our reading. So what have we found in practice?

VARD: Spell-checking early modern English

Give VARD an early modern text and it will do two things: spell-check and modernise.

When a word matches a word form in current English, VARD will move on to the next word.

Standard historic verb forms such as “leaveth” and “believest” will be modernised (“leaves”, “believe”). Some archaisms survive this process, e.g. “hath”. The second person singular pronoun “thou” is also allowed to stand, though this can result in some ungrammatical combinations; e.g. a VARD-ed text yielding “thou believe”.

For non-standard or unrecognised spellings, VARD identifies and calculates the probabilities of a range of possible solutions. It implements the ‘best’ change automatically (at the user’s instigation) only if its confidence exceeds the chosen parameters. For our samples, we have found that setting the F-Score at 2 (a slight increase in recall) achieves optimal results with the default threshold for auto-normalisation (50%). For the 1596 pamphlet, The nature of Kauhi or Coffe, and the Berry of which it is made, Described by an Arabian Phisitian, this setting automatically resolves “Coffee” (56.89% confidence) and “Physician” (76%).

VARD’s interventions are not always so effective. Continuing with the coffee text (EEBO-TCP A37215) we observe that VARD also amends the Arabic month name Ab to Obe, a noun referring to villages in ancient Laconia, (50.12%). This weakness reflects the fact that VARD operates with lexicons from a specified language (in this case modern English) and measures the appropriateness of solutions only within that language.¹ Another problematic amendment in the sample is the substitution of “Room” for “Rewme” (actually a variant of the noun ‘rheum’).

In the four texts we have sampled, VARD introduces some important corrections. But it also introduces errors, resolving “Flix” (Flux) as “Flex”, “Pylate” (Pilate) to “Pilot”, and “othe” (oath) to “other”. Each such intervention creates one false positive and one false negative when the texts as a whole are counted and indexed.

The false positive/negative dilemma also presents when an early modern word form matches the standard form of a different word in modern English. The verbs “do” and “be” appear frequently in EEBO-TCP with a superfluous terminal “e”. To the uninitiated, an index of VARDed EEBO-TCP might suggest heightened interest in deer-hunting and honey-production in the latter quarter of the sixteenth century.²

MorphAdorner

MorphAdorner is set up for more extensive linguistic processing than VARD. From the basic input (the EEBO-TCP form), it tags or adorns that input with a minimum of five outputs.

A unique xml:id
An ‘actual spelling’ (spe)³
A regularised spelling (reg)
A part-of-speech tag (using the NUPOS tag set)
A lemma

Initially, MorphAdorner itemises the XML input creating a reference system that allows changes to be mapped and revisited. This is reflected in the xml:id.

The pros and cons of such output and the actual performance of MorphAdorner under observation is better understood when illustrated with some examples.

Output from MorphAdorner for "Vrine doeth"

Figure 1

As shown in Figure 1, in a medical text (A13300) “Vrine” is regularised to “Urine”, identified as a singular noun (n1) and indexed by the lemma “urine”. The verbal form “doeth” is regularised as “doth” and lemmatised as “do”. Its part of speech tag (vdz) designates “3rd singular present, ‘do'”.

Where the word form has been broken up by the TCP processing—whether because of a line-break in the original text or some other markup reflecting the format of the printed page—MorphAdorner is able to calculate and tokenise the whole word. So at the start of the coffee pamphlet, the first letter is printed with a decorated initial (“B”); to interpret it as part of the word form “Bun” (the name of the coffee plant in Arabic) means joining these portions together as ‘parts’ of a single word that then becomes a candidate for regularisation and lemmatisation (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

(MorphAdorner’s solution here is not ideal because it does not recognise the word as ‘foreign’. The lack of any preceding determinative means the word is taken as a proper noun which minimises the disruption of this false positive.)

It is noteworthy that MorphAdorner resolves “it selfe” into “itselfe” and thus regularised and lemmatised “itself”. This is not something VARD can achieve. However, the problem of collocations that were written in separate parts but have become compounds in modern English is more profound. Both MorphAdorner and VARD process “straighte way” (A13300) as “straight way”, “anye thinge” (A04975) as “any thing”, and leave “in soemuch” (A13300) untouched; counting only these single instances results in half-a-dozen false positives and three false negatives.

There are other items that cause problems but the most striking outcome of the comparison so far is a set of failures in the regularisation process. Three examples are given below:

“sight” is regularised to “sighed” (8 occurrences in A13300)

“hot” is regularised to “hight” (3 occurrences in A37215; 50 occurrences in A13300)

“an” is regularised to “and” (2 occurrences in A37215; 276 occurrences in A13300)

In each case the original spelling is an ordinary English word (something VARD would leave untouched) being used normally and the token is lemmatized correctly, but the regularisation entry represents an entirely separate English word. These problems came up in the small sections we sampled. That they reflect a problem with MorphAdorner rather than our application of it is evident from a search for “hot” and “hight” using the “regularized spellings” option via the Early Modern Print interface.

In effect, this indicates that MorphAdorner’s lemmatization may be significantly more reliable than the regularisation. It also means we may need to continue experimenting with VARD and MorphAdorner, and find automated ways—using comparisons—to look for other similarly ‘bugged’ terms.

Notes

^{1 It is possible to instruct VARD that a particular word or passage is from another language, and even to have it VARDed in that language (where a wordlist is available) but this requires human intervention at a close level.}
^{2 A CQPweb query showed “doe” exceeding 6 instances per million words (ipmw) in 1575–1599, with “bee” at 88.21 ipmw in 1586—the latter disproportionately influenced by the 265 instances in Thomas Wilcox’s Right godly and learned exposition, vpon the whole booke of Psalms (≈ 704 ipmw).}
^{3 In fact this already incorporates some replacement rules, so that “vrine” may be given the spe entry “urine” (cf. xml:id A13300_headed-018250); less productively, the rules also change “iuices” to “ivices” (A13300_headed-036790). Logically creating such permutations increases the possibility that MorphAdorner will detect a direct match in its next step. It may be that the “spe” field is an ‘actual or alternative’ spelling field.}

Texts sampled:

The extracts analysed comprised between 200 and 400 tokens from each of the following EEBO-TCP documents:

A04975: The pleasaunt playne and pythye pathewaye leadynge to a vertues and honest lyfe no lesse profytable, then delectable. V.L. [Valentine Leigh] London, ?1552. (STC 15113.5)
A13300: A rich store-house or treasury for the diseased Wherein, are many approued medicines for diuers and sundry diseases, which haue been long hidden, and not come to light before this time. Now set foorth for the great benefit and comfort of the poorer sort of people that are not of abilitie to go to the physitions. A.T. London, 1596. (STC 23606)
A14136: The obedie[n]ce of a Christen man and how Christe[n] rulers ought to governe…., William Tyndale, [Antwerp] 1528. (STC 24446)
A37215: The nature of the drink kauhi, or coffe, and the berry of which it is made described by an Arabian phisitian. English & Arabic. [Anṭākī, Dāʼūd ibn ʻUmar, d. 1599.] Oxford, 1659. (Wing D374)

EEBO-TCP and standard spelling

This post from 2015 outlines the challenge posed by non-standard spelling in early modern English with particular attention to Early English Books Online. It introduces two tools developed by others in order to assist searching and other language-based research: VARD and MorphAdorner.

The Linguistic DNA project relies on two very large linguistic data sources for evidence of semantic and conceptual change from c.1500 to c.1800—Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership dataset (EEBO-TCP),and Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).* The team has begun by digging into EEBO-TCP, assessing the data (and its dirtiness), and planning how to process it with all of its imperfections.

Early Modern English orthography is far from standardised, though standardisation increases considerably towards the end of the period in question. One of the goals of the EEBO-TCP project is to faithfully represent Early Modern English artefacts in digital form as both image scans and keyed texts. For Early Modernists, working with orthographic variation in such faithful transcriptions is no surprise. However, many users of EEBO-TCP, particularly public-facing users such as librarians, noted from the beginning that an average searcher might have difficulty with the number of false negatives returned by a search query—i.e. the number of instances of a word that the search interface fails to find due to their non-standard forms.

The orthographic standardisation that is part of a day’s work for Early Modernists is no small feat for computers. On the other hand, counting very large numbers of data points in very large data sets, and doing so very quickly, is exactly what computers are good at. Computers just need to be given clear and complete instructions on what to count (instructions provided by programmers with some help from Early Modernists).

ProQuest addressed the issue of spelling variation in their Chadwyck EEBO-TCP web interface with VosPos (Virtual Orthographic Standardisation and Part Of Speech). VosPos was developed at Northwestern University, based on research by Prof. Martin Mueller and the staff of the Academic Technologies group. Among other things, VosPos identifies a part of speech and lemma for each textual word, and matches each textual word to a standard spelling. Users searching EEBO-TCP for any given word using a standard spelling can thus retrieve all instances of non-standard spellings and standard or non-standard inflectional forms as well.

Querying EEBO-TCP for ‘Linguistic DNA’

Our project aims to analyse the lexis in the entire EEBO dataset in various ways, all of which depend on our ability to identify a word in all of its various spellings and inflections. While the VosPos web interface is extremely useful for online lexical searches, it’s not the tool for the task we’ve set ourselves. So, we began by sorting through a sample of EEBO-TCP XML files, cataloguing some of the known, recurring issues in both spelling and transcription in the dataset—not just the Early Modern substitutability of v for u, for example, but also EEBO-TCP transcription practices such as using the vertical line character (|) to represent line breaks within a word. We quickly came to two conclusions: First, we weren’t going to build a system for automatically standardising the variety of orthographic and transcription practices in the EEBO data. Because second, someone else had already built such a system. Two someones, in fact, and two systems: VARD and MorphAdorner.

VARD (VARiant Detector)

VARD aims to standardise spelling in order to facilitate additional annotation by other means (such as Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging or semantic tagging). It uses spell-checking technology and allows for manual or automatic replacement of non-standard spellings with standard ones. VARD 1 was built on a word bank of over 40,000 known spelling variants for Early Modern English words. VARD 2 adds additional features: a lexicon composed of words that occur at least 50 times in the British National Corpus, and a lexicon composed of the Spell Checking Oriented Word ListVARD 2 also includes a rule bank of known Early Modern English letter substitutions, and a phonetic matching system based on Soundex. VARD identifies non-standard spellings and then suggests a standard spelling via the following steps: identifying known variants from the word bank; identifying possible letter replacements from the rule bank; identifying phonetically similar words via the phonetic matching algorithm; and, finally, calculating a normalised Levenshtein distance for the smallest number of letters that can be changed for the textual word to become the standard spelling. VARD learns which method is most effective over time for a given text or set of texts, and additional parameters (such as weighting for recall and precision, respectively) can be manually adjusted. VARD has already been incorporated into the SAMUELS semantic tagger by Alistair Baron at Lancaster University alongside our own team members at Glasgow University, Marc Alexander and Fraser Dallachy.

MorphAdorner

MorphAdorner, like VosPos, was developed at Northwestern University by a team including Martin Mueller and Philip Burns. MorphAdorner 2.0 was designed to provide light but significant annotation for EEBO-TCP in particular, expanded to an array of other digital texts, towards what Mueller calls a ‘book of English’, a highly searchable corpus covering the full history of the language, from which a variety of information could be extracted efficiently. To that end, MorphAdorner includes two tools for POS-tagging (a trigram tagger and a rule-based tagger), and incorporates POS data in its spelling standardisation. Word banks for spelling standardisation are drawn from the OED and Webster’s data, as well as from EEBO-TCP training data, adding up to several hundred thousand variant forms. Those word banks are supplemented by a rule bank in identifying appropriate alternates. MorphAdorner recommends a standard spelling via the following steps: applying all rules from the rule bank to determine if any result in a standard spelling or a spelling that matches a known variant in the rule bank; calculating edit distance for the resulting spellings for the smallest number of letters that can be changed to turn the textual word into the known variant or standard spelling; calculating a weighted string similarity between the original word and the known variants or standards, based on letter pair similarity, phonetic distance, and edit distance; identifying the POS of the original word and limiting the possible variants by POS; selecting the found spelling with the highest similarity.

Some of the transcription issues in the EEBO-TCP data are solved within the MorphAdorner pipeline before the spelling standardisation process begins, partly by using Abbot, another system designed at Northwestern University (by Mueller and Burns), which converts dissimilar XML files into a common form. Abbot can therefore be used to automatically convert some of the EEBO-TCP XML transcription norms into a form that is more easily readable by MorphAdorner. Logically, this clean-up should improve things for VARD too.

So, what’s the best tool for our job?

There was considerable discussion of both VARD and MorphAdorner at last month’s Early Modern Digital Agendas institute at the Folger Institute in Washington, DC. On Twitter, @EMDigital reported that each was built with its own set of assumptions; that Folger’s Early Modern Manuscripts Online is now considering which one to use; and that the Visualising English Print project used VARD for standardisation but may switch to MorphAdorner in the future. Each tool has already been used in a variety of ways, some quite unexpected: VARD has been used to orthographically standardise classical Portuguese, and MorphAdorner has been used to standardise variation in contemporary medical vocabulary.

What will work best for us? Given the absence of documented comparisons for the two tools, we’ve realised we need to investigate what we can do with each.

The team is now working through the following stages:

Pre-process a sample of EEBO-TCP transcriptions so that words are more readily identifiable for further processing. (This should strike out those vertical lines.)
Take the pre-processed sample and process it using VARD and MorphAdorner, respectively. This will require optimising parameters in VARD (f-score balances and confidence threshold).
Assess the resulting two annotated samples (the first ‘VARDed’ and the second ‘MorphAdorned’) in order to identify the strengths of each tool, and what benefits each might provide for the project.

We anticipate presenting the results of this process at the project’s methodological workshop at the University of Sussex in September, and will post updates on the blog as well.

Further Reading:

Basu, Anupam. 2014. Morphadorner v2.0: From access to analysis. Spense Review 44.1.8. http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-44/441/digital-projects/morphadorner-v20-from-access-to-analysis. Accessed July, 2015.

Gadd, Ian. 2009. The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online. Literature Compass 6 (3). 680-92.

Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. [nd]. Early Modern Print: Text Mining Early Printed English. http://earlyprint.wustl.edu/. Accessed July, 2015.

Mueller, Martin. 2015. Scalable Reading. [Blog]. https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/. Accessed July, 2015.

* Initially, we planned to include the full body of Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) in our analysis. A later post explains why most of ECCO was not reliable for our purposes. Our interface incorporates the small portion of ECCO that has been transcribed through the Text Creation Partnership (ECCO-TCP).