New Methods in Historical Corpora

Investigating the history of a language depends
on fragmentary sources, but electronic corpora
offer the possibility of alleviating the problem of bad data . But they cannot overcome it totally,
and questions arise of the optimal architecture
for a corpus and its representativeness of
actual language use, and how a historical
corpus can best be annotated to maximize its
usefulness. Immense strides have been made
in recent years in addressing these questions,
with exciting new methods and technological
advances. The papers in this volume, which
were presented at a conference on New
Methods in Historical Corpora (Manchester
2011), exemplify the wide range of these
recent developments.