---
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
paperswithcode_id: null
language:
- en
language_creators:
- found
license:
- cc-by-sa-3.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
pretty_name: Lampeter Corpus
size_categories:
- n<1K
source_datasets:
- original
task_categories:
- text-classification
task_ids:
- multi-label-classification
- multi-class-classification
---
# The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts
120 complete tracts and pamphlets published in England between 1640 and 1740 (earliest dated text 1641, latest 1739), compiled at Chemnitz University of Technology by Josef Schmied, Claudia Claridge and Rainer Siemund with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and distributed by the [Oxford Text Archive](https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/3193). The texts come from the Tract Collection of the Founders' Library at the University of Wales, Lampeter, largely a bequest of the Bowdler family.
The corpus is balanced by construction: six subject domains × ten decades from the 1640s to the 1730s × two texts each. All 120 texts have different authors; major literary figures were excluded deliberately, and only first editions were used apart from a few later editions revised by their original authors. Individual tracts run 3,000–20,000 words. They were keyed directly from the 17th- and 18th-century originals rather than from modern editions, so original spelling, punctuation and word division are retained — expect unnormalised orthography before pointing any modern lexicon-based tool at it.
## Fields
| field | notes |
| --- | --- |
| `id` | e.g. `SciB1735` — domain prefix, sequence letter, year |
| `text` | body paragraphs, joined (see below) |
| `date` | year of publication, parsed from the last four characters of `id` |
| `genre` | `Law`, `Economy`, `Religion`, `Politics`, `Science` or `Miscellaneous`, derived from the first character of `id`; 20 texts each |
| `head` | first heading in the body; empty for 14 of the 120 texts |
| `title` | short title |
> [!WARNING]
> The repo still ships a legacy Python loading script, which `datasets` no longer runs (`RuntimeError: Dataset scripts are no longer supported`). Until it is converted to Parquet, work from the TEI XML in the OTA record.
## What `text` is not
`text` is assembled from the `` elements of the TEI `
` only. The `` matter (title pages, dedications, prefaces) and `` matter (postscripts, appendices) are dropped, as is any non-paragraph content inside the body. On the OTA TEI file that leaves roughly 935,000 whitespace-separated tokens against the 1,193,385 words reported for the full corpus. The missing fifth is precisely the paratext the compilers went out of their way to include: the corpus was built to hold complete texts, title page to FINIS. Nine of the 120 texts wrap several sub-texts in a ``, and only the first sub-text's body is carried across.
The TEI headers also hold Wing STC numbers (on 72 of 120 texts), Lampeter shelfmarks, print place, printer and bookseller names, and page format (on 62). None of that reaches these fields; read the source XML if you need it.
## Use
- Diachronic study of Early Modern English over a decade-balanced sample — `date` plus `text`.
- Register and subject-domain comparison across the six areas.
- `genre` classification, bearing in mind that 120 documents at 20 per class is evaluation-sized, not training-sized, and that the perfectly balanced design flatters accuracy figures.
Selection compounds: what one Welsh college library happened to hold, narrowed by a single family's bequest, narrowed again by the compilers' sampling frame. Most tracts were printed in London — a consequence of how printing and press licensing were organised in early modern Britain, not of the topics covered.
## Licence
CC BY-SA 3.0, per the Oxford Text Archive record. Share-alike propagates to derivatives.
## Citation
```
@misc{20.500.12024/3193,
title = {The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts},
author = {Schmied, Josef and Claridge, Claudia and Siemund, Rainer},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/3193},
note = {Oxford Text Archive},
copyright = {Distributed by the University of Oxford under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License}
}
```
Corpus description: Siemund, Rainer and Claudia Claridge (1997). "The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts". *ICAME Journal* 21, 61–70. Full manual: Claridge, Claudia (1999/2003), *"Life is ruled and governed by opinion": The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. Manual of Information*.