A Historian's Perspective on Context and Corpora
"This paper presents the use of British Library's Nineteenth Century Newspapers collection (approx. 30 billion words) to explore discourses surrounding immigration. It does so from the perspective of a historian who has newly embraced a corpus linguistic approach. Shifting from one discipline to another has serious methodological implications, among which one of the most problematic involves context. The de-contextualisation of the newspaper document within a machine-readable corpus, which strips out images, dislocates articles from their original position on the page, and buries headlines, problematizes the historian's traditional approach to a source. It also raises questions about how integral the sources' materiality is to our interpretation of it, and whether our reading changes as our experience does. However, the re-contextualisation of the sources as digitised corpus data also opens up exciting new research directions, some of which are unimaginable via a manual reading of the texts. The presentation will conclude with an examination of how other historians employing corpus-based methods have acknowledged, and to what extent they have overcome, the issues related to this crucial notion of context."
Week 27 2015/2016
Thursday 2nd June 2016
3:00-4:00pm
Furness LT 3
