Prof. Marianne Hundt

English Department – University of Zurich

From the Page to the Screen: Digitising 18th-century Manuscripts for Research in Linguistics

The paper reports on a one-year project in digital teaching and research in English linguistics. The goal of the project was to digitise the diaries of an member of the lower aristocracy in England and subsequently use the digitised resource in studies of constructional change. I will briefly introduce the manuscript materials in their historical context. For the digitisation of the materials, we developed a plug-in for Transkribus. The paper will report on the steps taken in the digitisation, including the user-friendly XML annotation interface. I will conclude with a few case studies on constructional change that compare the diary materials with a contemporary benchmark corpus.