Early English Texts Now Available Online
February 16, 2015
The phrase “early English literature” encompasses texts written from the mid-fifteenth century to 1700. Now, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries tells us about its exciting project to make such works available to anyone with Internet access in, “Thousands of Early English Books Released Online to Public by Bodleian Libraries and Partners.” The University of Michigan Library is also involved in the project, which will release some 25,000 texts. The fully searchable files can be downloaded in different formats or read online.
The works were compiled some time ago by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), which spent 15 years manually entering and XML-encoding the texts. The results were made available to users of academic libraries at the time, but were released into the public domain at the turn of the new year. The post informs us:
“Members of the public, teachers and researchers around the world can now have access to thousands of transcriptions of English texts published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The corpus includes important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries.
“The text-only files are a unique resource for members of the public to browse for curious and interesting topics and titles ranging from witchcraft and homeopathy to poetry and recipes. In addition to browsing and reading text-only versions of these early English books, users of EEBO-TCP can also search the entire corpus, which contains more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. The text has been encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing individuals to search for keywords and themes across the entire collection of works, in individual books or even within specific sections of text such as stage directions or tables of contents.”
Michael Popham, head of the Bodleian Libraries’ digital collections, is excited about the full-search functionality. He expects the tool will allow users to make connections, cross-references, and discoveries unlike ever before.
Cynthia Murrell, February 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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