Preface

This manual accompanies the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (henceforth Lampeter Corpus), which is available both through ICAME on CD-Rom and through the Oxford Text Archive (OTA)on the internet. The copyright of the corpus and the electronic version of all the texts contained in it lies with the compilers of the corpus, namely Josef Schmied, Claudia Claridge, and Rainer Siemund. The copyright of the original, non-electronic versions of the corpus texts remains with the Founders' Library of the University of Wales in Lampeter.

It is the aim of this manual to provide the basic information which will be necessary for any prospective user of the Lampeter Corpus in order to make the best possible use of it. Thus, it contains a description of the original collection from which the corpus was selected and how the idea of the corpus evolved from it (chapter 1). Chapter 2 offers an account of the setup of the corpus, along with some historical background information, which has influenced the corpus setup. The encoding conventions employed in the corpus are listed and explained in chapter 3. The appendices list titles of texts, authors and corpus statistics in an easily accessible format.

The compilers of the Lampeter Corpus wish to express their gratitude towards the following institutions and people without whom the compilation of the corpus would not have been possible. First and foremost, our greatest debt is to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG - German Research Foundation), who generously funded our project for four years. The other major debt we owe to the University of Wales in Lampeter, and to name one person in particular, Thomas Roderick, for allowing us access to their materials. As regards the actual corpus work, Eva Hertel was responsible for the early stages of compilation. Several under-graduate student assistants patiently helped in the (after all not very exciting) work of typing, annotating and proof-reading the corpus texts: above all Jeannine Stöhrer, but also Angelika Giesecke, Astrid Lohse, Anja Ficker, Daniela Zierold, Mario Nyeki, and Manuela Sachs. The corpus passages in Greek script were transliterated by Daniela Schindling (Chemnitz), and the items in Semitic script by Gerry Knowles (Lancaster University). Hildegard Schäffler provided us with the ESTC-information for the headers. Finally, a great big "thank-you" goes to Lou Burnard (Oxford University), without whom the encoding of the corpus would be much less elegant and effective.

-Contents-