In her talk, Heather Froehlich will explore how to use the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and Early English Books Online-Text Creation Project (EEBO-TCP) Phase I to understand the language of madness in two subsets of early English print: firstly, in a selection of 336 dramatic works (1514-1662) and secondly in 25,000 transcriptions of early English books. She will demonstrate how to harvest historically relevant terms from the Historical Thesaurus and then apply them to EEBO-TCP. In doing so, she has identified different lexical references to madness, with a clear division in use of the 4-word phrase ‘I am not mad’ in dramatic and non-dramatic writing.

Coffee will be provided! This event is open to the public.

This is part one of a two-part series with Heather Froehlich, a historical sociolinguist from the University of Strathclyde. Both events are sponsored by the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

Bio

Heather Froehlich studies social identity in Early Modern London plays (1514-1662) and EEBO-TCP Phase I at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she is also a research assistant on the Visualizing English Print (1470-1700) project (a collaboration between Strathclyde, UW-Madison, and the Folger Shakespeare Library). Her work draws on socio-historic linguistics and corpus stylistics, though she sustains an interest in digital methods for literary and linguistic inquiry. Read more about her and her research on her blog or on twitter (@heatherfro).