Is EEBO-TCP / LION Suitable for Attribution Studies?

A smaller repository, Literature Online (LION), resembling the Chadwyck-Healey collections, contains over a third of a million full-text works of poetry, prose and drama in English, together with online criticism and a reference library.4 The transformation of these vast resources from microfilm to...

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Published in:	Early modern literary studies 2019-01, Vol.21 (1), p.1-34
Main Author:	Vickers, Brian
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Authorship English language Ideograph recognition Jackson, MacDonald Libraries Library collections Literary canon Literary criticism Literary devices Literary influences Literature Metaphor Narrative techniques Plot (Narrative) Poetry Prose Pruitt, Anna Shakespeare studies Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) Theater Websites
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Summary:	A smaller repository, Literature Online (LION), resembling the Chadwyck-Healey collections, contains over a third of a million full-text works of poetry, prose and drama in English, together with online criticism and a reference library.4 The transformation of these vast resources from microfilm to CD-ROM and finally online, has opened them up to a world-wide public. In partnership with ProQuest and with more than 150 libraries, their aim is to generate 'highly accurate, fullysearchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts corresponding to books from the Early English Books Online Database'.5 Where other electronic databases have been produced by the inaccurate mof optical character recognition, the TCP texts provide keyboarded full-text transcriptions of EEBO images, linked to the individual page images. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe proposed to read 'brakes of vice': as Steggle puts it, 'an easy aural error; "vice" would fit with "virtue" in the line before', and the antithesis would be clarified.7 No illustrative contemporary example had been found for this phrase, but in searching EEBO-TCP Steggle discovered that 'the "brakes" are a metaphor for vanity, self-indulgence or foolish entanglement', as in a 1629 devotional tract by Richard Brathwaite, which refers to 'the pricking brakes of sensuality' and 'the brakes of vanitie'.8 Three centuries later, an electronic database supports an emendation by the first Shakespeare editor. The value of these resources to authorship studies seems undeniable, and MacDonald Jackson, that frequent pioneer, recognised its potential in an essay published in 2001.14 It is an accepted fact that, due to the intense competition between Elizabethan theatre companies, dramatists regularly wrote under time pressure and were prone to repeat words and phrases that they had used before.
ISSN:	1201-2459 1201-2459