Seventeenth-Century English Newsbooks From 1654 To 1655

This corpus contains two collections of keyboarded seventeenth-century English newsbooks from the Thomason Tracts. The first includes every surviving London newsbook from the first half of 1654, and the second contains all issues of the idiosyncratic 'Mercurius Fumigosus' from summer 1654 to autumn 1655. The data was funded by the British Academy and released in version 1.0 in April 2007.

Use Cases

• Analyze text re-use patterns across the 1654_newsbooks collection to study news reportage practices.
• Conduct a stylistic analysis of the 'Mercurius Fumigosus' collection to understand its idiosyncratic nature.
• Perform temporal analysis on the publication dates within the specified time ranges (e.g., Dec 1653 to May 1654).
• Compare linguistic features between the general 1654_newsbooks and the specific 'Mercurius Fumigosus' authored by John Crouch.

Strengths

• Focuses on two distinct, well-defined historical collections with clear temporal boundaries.
• Derived from the authoritative Thomason Tracts collection held at the British Library.
• Data is keyboarded, providing machine-readable text for analysis.

Limitations

• The dataset size, row count, and specific columns are unknown, limiting pre-download assessment.
• The corpus version (1.0) was released in April 2007 and may not reflect the most current historical scholarship.
• Limited to specific time periods (1654-1655) and publications, not representative of the entire century.

Provenance

Source

Thomason Tracts collection at the British Library, available via Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Collection Method

Keyboarded versions constructed for specific British Academy-funded research projects.

Time Range

First collection: second half of December 1653 to end of May 1654 (with some June 1654). Second collection: summer 1654 to early autumn 1655.

Freshness

Last platform update was 2022-08-18, but the corpus version 1.0 was released in April 2007.

Geography

London, England.