The EEBO corpus contains more than 25 000 English texts from the period 1475–1700, which were digitalized by theText Creation Partnership organization as part of the Early English Books Online project; a detailed description of the digitalization process is available here. The size of the corpus is approximately 730 million words.
Metadata and structuring of texts were treated for use in the KonText interface in such a way that their basic structural information was preserved (text highlights, its division etc.) including links to the on-line version. The meanings of the individual structures and their attributes are based on the TEI P5, and are also described in the following chart:
| structure | attribute | description |
|---|---|---|
<doc> | title | document title |
<doc> | author | document author |
<doc> | year | publication year (may be an interval) |
<doc> | decade | decade containing the publication year |
<doc> | period | period containing the publication year |
<doc> | biblio | bibliographic information |
<doc> | webSource | full text link in HTML format |
<doc> | ePubSource | full text link in ePUB format |
<doc> | id | document identifier |
<div> | type | part of text and its type |
<head> | heading | |
<p> | paragraph | |
<hi> | rend | highlight and type (typefaces etc.) |
<pb> | facs | link to a page containing a scan (limited access) |
<lg> | verse | |
<l> | line | |
<sp> | utterance (esp. in plays) | |
<speaker> | speaker (esp. in plays) | |
<stage> | stage note (esp. in plays) | |
<list> | list | |
<label> | list label | |
<item> | list item | |
<abbr> | abbreviation | |
<q> | citation | |
<bibl> | bibliographic citation |
For a basic overview of how to use the EEBO corpus and how to input the data into the search interface check our wiki-course in eight lessons:
EEBO - Early English Books Online. Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Prague 2014. Available from WWW: http://www.korpus.cz