Christian Kay

The Oxford English Dictionary Online

methodologies, advances and insights in the different research areas that are discussed. However, some critical notes can be made about the organization of the materials. Of course, each of the subjects addressed fills whole bookshelves of monographs (and many of those are mentioned and listed in the bibliography). Yet, the limited space in some places downgrades the abundant amount of research reviews to a shallowly annotated list of references (for example, chapter 5 mentions about thirty studies in only eighteen pages). The lack of graphical materials (actually, chapter 4 is the only one containing figures, in the form of tables) is sometimes annoying, especially in descriptions of electronic products and their interfaces. Also, the combination of a loose structure and interdisciplinary approach is not always successful. Often Hockey hooks her narrative to methodological pegs, other times the reader has to notice a transition to a more thematic organization. This also causes some methodological-theoretical issues, like for example corpus design, to reappear in different places throughout the book, whereas it would perhaps be more suitable to treat them in a less fragmented manner. The boundaries between the different research areas in the chapters are not always very clear either. Some topics in the fifth chapter on literary analysis (echoed phrases, genre, gender analysis) and the sixth chapter on linguistic analysis (analysis of lexical features to characterize textual styles) seem to overlap with the seventh chapter on stylometry and attribution studies (in which only the latter subject is highlighted, however). This may result from an imbalance in assumed background knowledge about the techn(olog)ical aspects of electronic texts on the one hand, and the different research areas that make use of them on the other hand. Sometimes the narrative prevails over clear structuring of and motivation for the items covered. Hockey very rigidly introduces the technological concepts in a very comprehensible manner, yet neglects to introduce the chapters discussing their application in the different research fields with a clear theoretical definition of those fields. This leads me to a (maybe provoking, but hopefully balanced) conclusion about the book. At its best (in my opinion mainly the first four chapters), it provides a broad overview of humanities computing and literature in that field. At its worst (chapters 5 to 9), it threatens to prove that a reader does not necessarily need electronic texts to get lost in his/her quest for relevant information.

Data mining and search enhancements using the historical thesaurus of English

In this paper, we describe a new and unique thesaurus which allows us to address temporal aspects in search and data mining, and to improve context-based retrieval. We discuss the application of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) to semantic tagging of texts from AD 700 to the current day, and present several use-cases where the power of HTE is highly exploitable for linguistics, information retrieval and computational approaches to meaning.

Semantic Relationships in the Historical Thesaurus of English

This paper describes work on the Historical Thesaurus of English, a research project at Glasgow University, and the importance of such onomasiological work to the study of the history of the English Language. Two sub-sections of data, one concrete (sofa/couch) and one abstract (difficult), are exemplified and examined in detail. Section 3 discusses the implications of these studies in terms of semantic theory and of links between the lexicon and material culture. The concluding section examines the modern usage of the three commonest terms in British English, sofa, settee and couch.