LibGuides: English: Data

Datasets

Sharing large corpora of data can also lead to the creation of new ways of exploring and discovery scholarship – effectively giving researchers another lens through which to view the published literature.

HathiTrust Digital Library: Datasets This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust makes the texts of public domain works in its corpus available for research purposes. The data includes approximately 350,000 public domain volumes. The works fall into two categories: non-Google-digitized volumes, which are freely available, and Google-digitized volumes, which are available through an agreement with Google. HathiTrust can also assist in the creation of custom datasets.
JSTOR Data for Research (DfR) This link opens in a new window
The Data for Research (DfR) service is provided by JSTOR for use by the research community. It provides a set of web-based tools for selecting and interacting with content from the JSTOR archive, an archives that spans hundreds of years and billions of words of text.
The DfR service is completely free and available to the public.
BYU Google Books Viewer This link opens in a new window
With the standard Google Books interface, you can only do the most basic type of search -- just the simple frequency of a word or phrase. This interface helps unlock the potential of the Google Books data. It offers the same corpora as available in N-Grams.
BYU Time Magazine Corpus This link opens in a new window
This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100 million words of text of American English from 1923 to the present, as found in TIME magazine. You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency and see how words have changed meaning over time.

Data Visualisation and Research Tools

Google Ngram Viewer This link opens in a new window
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.
BYU Google Books Viewer This link opens in a new window
This interface helps unlock the potential of the Google Books data. Search by word, phrase, substring, lemma, part of speech, synonyms, and collocates (nearby words). You can copy the data to other applications for further analysis, and you can quickly and easily compare the data in two different sections of the corpus.

Directories of Additional Tools:

DH Toychest: Digital Humanities Resources for Project Building Guides, tools, and other resources for practical work in the digital humanities by researchers, teachers, and students.
Digital Textuality Resource Pages A repository of tools that can be used in the production of Digital Textuality.
TAPoR A gateway to the tools used in sophisticated text analysis and retrieval.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Interesting Examples

Mapping Colonial Americas Publishing Project Aims to visualize New World printing over geographic space and across literary genres from European contact to 1800.
Mapping the Republic of Letters Sophisticated, interactive visualization tools that map the world of scholarship through networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination and the criticism of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.

Research Centres

centerNet An international network of digital humanities centers.
Stanford Literary Lab A research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature.