Opportunities and threats of historical evidence and data via corpus-based software: a case study on Gerard Malynes

The aim of this paper is to exploit the informative nature of datasets that can be created from corpus-based software to explore specific phenomena in early modern specialized discourse, and to corroborate the adoption of the same software for historical analysis. Particular relevance will be devoted to the special nature of historical evidence, which has caused critical issues in the reliability of the data collected for the purpose of historical investigation of English. Spelling variation, in this sense, is one of the most crucial problems of Early Modern English, and this has often affected the reliability of data to be collected via software, especially when statistical findings are involved. The normalisation of historical texts has contributed enormously to make texts better readable for historical corpus analysis; and, consequently, to improve the accuracy and manipulation of data. Moreover, several tools used in corpus linguistics have benefited from the normalisation of spelling variants in the same terms, e.g. part-of-speech taggers for historical variety. This case study will attempt to explore the data retrievable from corpus-based software like VARD, #LancsBox and CQPweb, and to use them to corroborate a preliminary analysis of early modern economics discourse in two treatises written by Gerard Malynes in 1601 and 1623.