3  Words

3.1 Sample Research Questions

• When is the word “data” introduced to English and how does its use change over time?
• Does Shakespeare have a vocabulary distinct from other authors?
• How do we overcome historical spelling and word-form irregularity?

3.2 Tools and Websites

• EarlyPrint & EEBO:
  • EarlyPrint N-gram Browser
  • EarlyPrint Corpus Search Beta
  • EarlyPrint Phrase Search
  • EEBO-TCP
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About EEBO
  • Text Encoding Initiative
• NLP & Text Analysis
  • Voyant
  • EarlyPrint + Python
  • MorphAdorner
  • Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English
  • MonadGPT
  • SpaCy
  • Stanza
  • Introduction to Cultural Analytics and Python

3.3 Activities

3.3.1 Comparing Word Search Strategies

1. Choose a word, and search for it using Corpus Search and the N-Gram Browser. How the results different when you look for regularized and non-regularized forms?

2. Select a phrase that includes that word, and devise the CQL query to search for it in Corpus Search. Look for the same term in the N-Gram Browser and Phrase Search. Can you begin to interpret the results of these three interfaces?

3. Export/download the results of the Corpus Search and look within those results for related words or other collocates.

3.3.2 Text Analysis

1. Follow the tutorials in the EarlyPrint + Python notebooks, especially the Metadata and Text Analysis exercises:

   • Specifically, refer to the Programming Historian tutorial on Text Similarity
   • Then, work through the EarlyPrint notebooks using Google Colab:
     • Exploring Vocabulary Using Tf-Idf
     • Text Similarity

3.4 References

• Heffernan and Sagner Buurma (2018)
• Furner (2016)
• Hope and Witmore (2010)
• Craig (2011)
• Yang and Eisenstein (2016)
• Kulick and Ryant (2020)
• Witmore, Hope, and Gleicher (2016)
• Basu (2025)
• Basu and Loewenstein (2019)

Basu, Anupam. 2025. Shakespeare and Scale: The Archive of Early Printed English. Cambridge Elements: Shakespeare and Text. Cambridge UP. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/shakespeare-and-scale/B3EB39E9F6049B8A203150FCB2DE4E5E.

Basu, Anupam, and Joseph Loewenstein. 2019. “Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and Historical Stylometrics.” Spenser Studies 33 (January): 63–102. https://doi.org/10.1086/700300.

Craig, Hugh. 2011. “Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Myth and Reality.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (1): 53–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2011.0002.

Furner, Jonathan. 2016. “‘Data’: The Data.” In Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honor of Rafael Capurro, edited by Matthew Kelly and Jared Bielby, 287–306. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14681-8_17.

Heffernan, Laura, and Rachel Sagner Buurma. 2018. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, April. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace.

Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. 2010. “The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ’Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (3): 357–90.

Kulick, Seth, and Neville Ryant. 2020. “Parsing Early Modern English for Linguistic Search.” arXiv:2002.10546 [Cs], February. http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10546.

Witmore, Michael, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Gleicher. 2016. “Digital Approaches to the Language of Shakespearean Tragedy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198724193.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198724193-e-20.

Yang, Yi, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2016. “Part-of-Speech Tagging for Historical English.” arXiv:1603.03144 [Cs], April. http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03144.