Historical corpora for historical research
Sketch Engine helps historians analyse historical texts using corpus tools. Search for words and phrases in context, examine their frequency and compare language across periods, authors and genres.
Build your own historical corpus
Upload historical texts in formats such as TXT, PDF and DOC to create a searchable corpus. You can also collect texts from selected websites.
Divide your corpus into subcorpora to focus on a particular period, author or genre.
Explore historical corpora
Sketch Engine includes historical corpora in several languages. The examples below cover literary works, dialogues, newspapers and parliamentary proceedings.
| Corpus | Language | Period | Open in Sketch Engine |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corpus of English Dialogues | English | 1560–1760 | Search ↗ |
| Historical English collection: EEBO, ECCO and Evans | English | 1473–1820 | Search ↗ |
| GerManC: Historical Corpus of German Newspapers | German | 1650–1800 | Search ↗ |
| Old and Middle French (BFM 2022) | French | 945–1497 | Search ↗ |
| Penn Historical Corpora | English | 1150–1900 | Search ↗ |
| Polish Parliamentary Corpus (PPC) | Polish | 1919–2020 | Search ↗ |
| DraCor drama corpora | 14 languages and dialects | 472 BC–AD 2017 | Choose corpus ↗ |
| LatinISE corpus | Latin | 8th century BC–21st century AD | Search ↗ |
Sketch Engine is also being used in the ChartEx project which applies text mining methods to medieval Latin charters. It will make the corpora publicly available through Sketch Engine as the project proceeds.
Access to some corpora requires permission from the copyright holder
This applies to English Dialogues and the Penn Historical Corpora.
Reference
Adam Kilgarriff, Miloš Husák and Robyn Woodrow (2012). The Sketch Engine as infrastructure for historical corpora. In Jeremy Jancsary (ed.). Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2012, pp. 351–356
Barbara McGillivray and Adam Kilgarriff (2012). Tools for historical corpus research, and a corpus of Latin (presentation). In New Methods in Historical Corpus Linguistics 3, Germany, 2013, pp. 247–255.
