ScotsCorr – Helsinki Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540–1750)

Description

The corpus comprises circa 0.4 million words (0.5 million tokens) of early Scottish correspondence by male and female writers dating from the period 1540–1750. The corpus consists of transcripts of original letter manuscripts, which reproduce the text disallowing any modernisation, normalisation or emendation. Language-external variables such as date, region, gender, addressee, hand and script type have been coded into the database. The writers originate from fifteen different regions of Scotland; these can be grouped to represent the areas of North, North-East, Central, South-East, and South-West. In addition, there are two categories of informants that have not been defined by geographical origin: representatives of the court and professional people such as members of the clergy. The proportion of female informants in the corpus is 21 per cent.