Writing Science, Compiling Science: The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing

Abstract

[Abstract] The Coruña Corpus: A Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing is a project on which the MUSTE Group has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruña (Spain). It has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation at all linguistic levels, though, in principle, phonology is not included among our intended research topics. A rough definition of our corpus would say it contains English scientific texts other than medical produced between 1600 and 1900. In order to retrieve information from the compiled data, we decided to create a corpus management tool. Loosely speaking the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) is an Information Retrieval (IR) system where the indexed textual repository is the set of compiled documents that constitutes the CC.