Dear all,
I wondered if anyone might know of any corpus of US literary works 1) that would cover at least two centuries; 2) which would be open access (or associated with a reasonable access fee; and 3) which would enable searching for basic linguistic patterns (especially when used with Nvivo)?
We'd like to look at how voices have been employed in the construction of literary characters over time.
Many thanks for any tips,
Míša
Míša Hejná this is a good question. I have to say that your profile photo is scary:-) I hope it does not put off responses to your question.
1. 2. 3.) cover at least two centuries... this sets off two replies. A.) while not exactly meeting completely your prerequisites the Google Ngram Viewer has an interactive look over the centuries of words and phrases from a corpus of numerous books, not all of which could be considered literary. so in the category American English I searched one thinks, she thought, you feel, he felt and go thttps://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+thinks%2Cshe+thought%2Cyou+feel%2Che+felt&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3
B.) make your own set of literary works from Mark Twain to Hemingway etc. from the Gutenburg Project https://www.gutenberg.org/ the majority of the books you would collect have been scanned and are easily searchable and can even be analyzed by online tools such as https://wordcount.com/ other sources of books are to be found in the internet archives, library genesis, google and amazon books and so on. Sometimes to use these sources you need to be clever. Feel to contact me if you need a hand. CGY
Hi Christopher - thank you so much for the suggestions, and apologies for such a sluggish response. This is some good food for thought indeed. (Happy 2023!).
(The larynx is a beautiful place - its beauty needs to be visually promoted.)
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