Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE)
CoWITE is a diachronic corpus of instructional and technical texts authored by women in English between 1550 and 1899. It contains approximately 1.75 million words, organised decade by decade, and includes excerpts from printed books and manuscripts related to cookery, domestic economy, health, and dietetics. The corpus supports research into historical patterns of modality, stance, politeness, and textual authority, and highlights women's contributions to knowledge transmission in domestic and (semi-)professional domains. CoWITE is part of the broader CoWTeE project and is available via the DiCoS-LA interface and Zenodo.
Project leader: Francisco J. Alonso-Almeida, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Size: c. 1.75 million words
• CoWITE16 (1550–1599): ~250,000 words (not published yet)
• CoWITE17 (1600–1699): ~500,000 words (not published yet)
• CoWITE18 (1700–1799): ~500,000 words (available)
• CoWITE19 (1800–1899): ~500,000 words (available)
Language: English, with British and American variants
Period: 1550–1899
Released: 2025 (CoWITE18, CoWITE19); forthcoming (CoWITE16, CoWITE17)
Funding: Agencia Estatal de Investigación, 2022–2025: award number PID2021-125928NB-I00
Reference line and copyright
CoWITE18 = Alonso Almeida, F., Álvarez-Gil, F. J., & Ortega-Barrera, I. (2025). Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (1700–1799) [Data set]. DiCoS-LA: https://dicos-la.com, Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15151249
CoWITE19 = Alonso-Almeida, F., Álvarez-Gil, F. J., Ortega Barrera, I., Quintana-Toledo, E., De la Cruz-Cabanillas, I., Bator, M., Sánchez Cuervo, M. E., & Gómez-Calderón, M. J. (2025). Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (1800–1899) [Data set]. DiCoS-LA: https://dicos-la.com, Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15097949
Compilers
Main compilers:
- Francisco J. Alonso-Almeida (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) – Project Leader, francisco.alonso@ulpgc.es
- Francisco J. Álvarez-Gil (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
- Ivalla Ortega-Barrera (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
- Elena Quintana-Toledo (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
The compilation of CoWITE19 also involved the collaboration of additional contributors who assisted in text retrieval, transcription, and metadata verification.
Availability and interface
Access to CoWITE is provided preferably via the DiCoS-LA platform: https://dicos-la.com
DiCoS-LA (Discourse, Communication and Society Language Analyser) is a web-based interface developed by the Discourse, Communication and Society Research Group at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The platform offers a growing set of tools for researchers interested in historical, specialised, and gendered corpora. The manual is found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15566009
The interface supports:
- Browsing by metadata, such as century, author, genre, and topic
- Keyword-in-context (KWIC) searches, with support for wildcards and partial matching
- Part-of-speech (POS) filtering, using a customised tagset adapted to historical instructive texts
- Export of concordances and frequency data for external analysis
- Access to metadata, including author details, date, genre, and language variety
We acknowledge that DiCoS-LA is still in development, and therefore very much in its infancy. Some features are being fine-tuned, and occasional lapses or technical limitations may occur. We kindly ask users to forgive any errors and welcome feedback as we continue to improve and expand the platform’s functionality.
In addition to DiCoS-LA, CoWITE is also archived in Zenodo for long-term access and citation:
Zenodo provides access to UTF-8 plain text files. Subcorpora CoWITE16 and CoWITE17 will also be made available through both DiCoS-LA and Zenodo once completed.
In addition to the corpus files, a detailed beta database of metadata and annotations has been created to accompany and document the project: Alonso Almeida, F., Álvarez-Gil, F. J., Ortega, I., & Quintana-Toledo, E. (2025). CoWITE DATABASE. Corpus of Women's Instructive Texts in English [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15571302 This database offers a structured overview of the corpus contents and can be consulted for information on authorship, dates, genres, topics, and transcription provenance. It complements the corpus interface at DiCoS-LA and facilitates further exploration of CoWITE’s internal organisation.
CoRD Entry submitted on June 2, 2025 by Francisco J. Alonso-Almeida.
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