What's new at the Textual Optics Lab

  • 9/22: We have completed work on a new release of the PhiloLogic software package. As part of this release, we rebuilt all of our text collections and migrated them to a new server. We have also added many new texts to several important collections. First, we are excited to offer in a single PhiloLogic instance all 53,831 of the EEBO-TCP texts produced under Phase I and Phase II, freely available to the public since August 2020. Second, we are now including all of the ECCO-TCP texts that were never fully proofed or edited in our newest build of the collection, bringing the total number of texts to 3,015. Moreover, we are now offering all of the EEBO and ECCO texts combined into a single PhiloLogic database. Oh yes, it's big: the database contains 1,510,798,988 words and 4,722,194 unique unique word forms drawn from over 56,000 texts. Finally, we're quite happy to have added a good number of new texts to the History of Black Writing Corpus, bringing the total for that collection to 1,146 works. Please feel free to contact us with any feedback you might have at textual.optics.lab@gmail.com.
  • 4/21: We’re happy to announce that the History of Black Writing Corpus has now doubled in size, from 450 novels to a total of 891. With our collaborators at Kansas University, we have spent the past few years continuing to scan and OCR this important collection. TOL research assistants Nia Morrison and Rahma Safraoui have spearheaded this effort and we are deeply grateful for all the work they have put in to making this corpus available.
  • 12/1/20: We have updated the US Novel Corpus with metadata on genre, which we produced with machine learning classification using Library of Congress tags as training data. You can read about this process on our blog.
  • 11/19: We have just released the Russian Drama Corpus, a collection of plays published between the 18th and 20th century.
  • 4/19: We are happy to announce the release of the Deutsches Text Archiv, a collection of German texts from the 1600s to 1900.
  • 11/18: The Texual Optics Lab is happy to announce the release of two early American collections: the EVANS-TCP collection, and the American Archives collection.
  • 11/18: The Textual Optics Lab is happy to announce the release of several new black writing collections: the Black Drama collection, and the Black Writing and Thought collection.
  • 5/18: Textual Optics Lab website is going live!