The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
Datamining Shakespeare ---
Othello is a Shakespearean tragedy: when the hero makes a terrible mistake of judgment, his once promising world is led into ruin. Computer analysis of the play, however, suggests that the play is a comedy or, at least, that it does the same things with words that comedies usually do.
On October 26, 2011,
Folger Shakespeare Library Director
Michael Witmore discussed his recent work in Shakespeare studies which combines computer analysis of texts, linguistics, and traditional literary history. Taking the case of Shakespeare's genres as a starting point, Witmore shows how subtle human judgments about the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote — were they
comedies,
histories or
tragedies? — are connected to frequent, widely distributed features in the playwright's syntax, vocabulary, and diction. (approx. 30 minute lecture.)
[more inside]
posted by crunchland
on Dec 8, 2011 -
29 comments
The Gawain Project is an ongoing translation of the late 14th century anonymous poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (originally written in Middle English) into Modern English, for the amusement of Arthurians and anyone who likes a good story.
[via mefi projects]
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 13, 2009 -
18 comments
The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies is your one-stop shop for pre-Columbian Central America awesomeness. There are so, so many wondrous things on that site, I don't quite know where to begin. I suppose John Pohl's
scholarly introduction is a natural place to start. But maybe you just don't have time to read anything and just want to dive into pretty, pretty pictures. Perhaps the most user-friendly databases are Justin Kerr's photographs
Maya Vases (e.g.
1,
2,
3) and
Pre-Columbian Portfolio (e.g.
1,
2a,
2b,
3). From there you can delve into the collection of Linda Schele's
photographs (e.g.
1,
2) and
drawings (e.g.
1,
2,
3). There are more image databases but let me direct you to the collection of
old Maya, Aztec and Mixtec books which are simply stunning (e.g.
1,
2,
3,
4 [last link pdf]). You can read more about
Mayan and
Mixtec codices and download high resolution versions of the entire books. There are also Maya
dictionaries,
glyph guides,
linguistic maps and a
who's who. There is also classic
Mayan and
Aztec poetry in translation. I'm telling you, that's not even half of what this amazing site has to offer.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 29, 2008 -
19 comments
In Parentheses is a collection of many ancient, medieval and classic texts from all over the world, many of whom are hard to find anywhere, let alone on the internet. There are translations from
Greek,
Old Norse,
Medieval Irish,
Japanese,
Incan,
Old French,
Medieval Latin and many more! As well as all that they have
papers in medieval studies and
vaguely decadent and
orientalism series. Adding to that there's a
linguistics section with wordlists and language flash cards in languages such as
Icelandic,
Quechua,
Basque,
Classical Armenian and a whole bunch more.
[flashcard links go to pdf files]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 10, 2008 -
18 comments
