Abstract for the From Correspondence to Corpora seminar, 15 November 2013, Helsinki, Finland.
Samuli Kaislaniemi (University of Helsinki)
The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) is a socially stratified corpus of English personal letters 1400-1800, and we the compilers take pride in its representativeness. But is it really possible that the CEEC contains no less than 10% of all surviving letters written by women in Tudor England? If true, this suggests that 'representativeness' is a skewed metric.
This talk is an attempt to address the complex and problematic relationship between the archival record (the manuscripts and documents that survive), the "edited truth" (what has been published), 'representative' corpora, and the original manuscript reality of Early Modern English women's letters. My aim is to raise questions about the very fundamentals of the digital resources we create.
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Slides (pdf).