Open Science for English Historical Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of an open-access resource that can be used as a baseline for new corpus-linguistic research into the history of English: the Language Change Database (LCD). The LCD draws together information extracted from hundreds of corpus-based articles that investigate the ways in which English has changed in the course of history. The database includes annotated summaries of the articles, as well as numerical data extracted from the articles and transformed into machine-readable form, thus providing scholars of English with the opportunity to study fundamental questions about the nature, rate and direction of language change. It will also make the work done in the field more cumulative by ensuring that the research community will have continuous access to existing results and research data. We will also introduce a tool that takes advantage of this new source of structured research data. The LCD Aggregated Data Analysis workbench (LADA) makes use of annotated versions of the numerical data available from the LCD and provides a workflow for performing meta-analytical experimentations with an aggregated set of data tables from multiple publications. Combined with the LCD as the source of collaborative, trusted and curated linked research data, the LADA meta-analysis tool demonstrates how open data can be used in innovative ways to support new research through data-driven aggregation of empirical findings in the context of historical linguistics.